They die as a case, a bed number, a set of forms, a body to be processed by a system that is efficient and kind but fundamentally impersonal.

The nurses are gentle, the paperwork is handled, everything is done correctly, and none of it involves the dying person being anyone’s.

They pass from the world having belonged, at the end, to no one, their death a matter of administration rather than of love.

And I had seen the terror of that in the eyes of the people I sat with, the specific fear, deeper than the fear of death itself, of ending as a nameless file, of the last fact of their life being that no one claimed them.

That is what Julian was asking me to spare him.