I leaned on a wall outside of the hospital. It was noon. I had driven up from DC that morning. It was a long drive on clogged, rush-hour streets giving way to empty highway and finally rolling rural roads past farms and fields of corn. I listened to a podcast about WWI that my buddy Jake had recommended. It was exactly 3 hours long, and so was the drive. I didn’t have to think much.

My mom parked her car and made the long walk across the parking lot to meet me. She had the dog with her: a tiny dog she had gotten recently to keep her company. The leash was wrapped around her wrist. Under her other arm, she carried papers: a script for the movie she was filming tomorrow. She wore oversized sunglasses and a fashionable top. Walking up, she looked a bit like Peggy Guggenheim. When she was two feet from me, she said hey.

“Hey,” I said softly.

There was a moment, a tremor, and then she was sobbing. I held her for a while. I didn’t tell her it would be okay. I listened.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She had been spending entire nights awake with her dad in the hospital.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, wiping her nose.

“Of course,” I said. I was full of simple, two-word answers. It dawned on me hazily then that the things we feel the strongest often come across in broken phrases. Yes, no, he’s dying, I’m okay, alright then, I love you. And so on.

We went inside. I had walked the linoleum halls before. We passed men in wheelchairs wearing hats like “Vietnam Vet” as we usually did. All this time and I never knew what to do. Often I said hello.

We took the elevator to the Hospice floor. It was my first time there. I don’t know what I had expected, but I had expected something else. I felt like I was back in elementary school. The walls were decorated with posters that celebrated hospice all-stars and calendars marking holidays big and small. Labor Day, Halloween, bingo, Hospice Friday, whatever that was. There was a smell too, a clean, artificial smell like all the bodily smells had been sanitized away and replaced with “Apple Pie” from Yankee Candle. Mom said it was aromatherapy.

When we got to his door, I thought we were in the wrong place. I caught a glimpse of the man inside, laying in bed, and I didn’t know it was him. I pitied whoever it was and thought that we would keep walking. But we stopped. Mom told me that I should prepare myself: seeing him could be shocking for me. I told her I would be alright.

We went inside. A policeman was standing by his bedside.

“I visit Joe every day,” he told us. “This man’s a hero.”

He started to say more and stopped. Nodding to us, he excused himself. I said thank you as he left more a grateful afterthought than anything else. The next few hours were full of grateful afterthoughts.

My grandfather lay in bed naked covered by a thin white sheet. His mouth was open, and his glassy eyes looked upwards at nothing in particular. He used to have bright green eyes. I said hey grandpa. He mumbled something. He knows you’re here, my mother said. Take his hand. We both held his hands. He squeezed mine. He was surprisingly strong still. It startled me a bit, but once I got used to it, it didn’t bother me. I sat down next to him. There was a computer monitor on my side of the bed playing classical piano music off YouTube. On the other side of the bed was a morpheme drip.

Mom stepped out to give us privacy. I sat there a while and talked to him. I told him that it was alright. I told him that I was alright and that my mother and grandmother would be okay. I told him that I would be strong. He didn’t have to be. He started trembling. Still holding my hand, he sat up and reached out for nothing in particular. He said his brother was there. He looked at me and said his brother.

Mom would tell me later that hallucinations were a side effect of Morphine. So was the reaching. The trembling was a result of electrical signals firing sporadically as his bodily systems shut down.

I said, I love you. Again, I said, I love you. I started saying I love you too after he mumbled things I couldn't decipher. I ran out of words to say the things I felt so I defaulted to I love you.

At one point, my grandma arrived. She looked splendid in a bright blue top. She was sad, but she was strong. Her eyes were bright. This was the best I had ever seen her. I put my arm around her and drew her close to me as we stood at his bedside.

The nurses came and went, always cheerful. I didn’t like it, but what would I have them do? They were professionals. They gave him morpheme. That was good, I guess. Then a doctor came and explained they needed to cath him so he could pee. The implication was that we should leave. They gave me time, but it felt rushed. I said I needed to step out and that I loved him. I probably said it more that day than I had my entire life, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. But then they were stripping the sheet off him, and I couldn’t look. I stepped out into the hall with my mom. She dispensed some hand sanitizer from a container mounted on the wall. She said, be careful. Germs. A lot of people get sick in hospitals. I did the hand sanitizer thing but told her this wasn’t a hospital.

We went to a room across the hall that was made for you to sleep. It had a little bed and lamp and some books on religion and forgiveness, and the air was so thick and still in that room. I sat in a chair knowing I couldn’t say anything really and then the little dog jumped up on me and licked my face. I was laughing, and mom was laughing and then she asked me how I was. I said I didn’t like how the nurses talked to him like a child.

“But that’s how it is. You know, when I go, I don’t want any of that,” she said. “There’s nothing glamorous about dying but I don’t want that.”

“I’ll have them read you Emily Dickinson or shut the fuck up.”

“Baudelaire, please,” my mother said. We laughed.

We left and went to a diner where mom had worked as a dishwasher in high school. We ran lines for the movie she was shooting tomorrow. I played a husband and wife so she could practice her part. At some point between feigning a high-pitched female voice and laughing, it dawned on me that I could have been at work today, in a meeting, discussing the latest update on our project, due in 8 months. And there was mom — sitting across the table, tired from the past few weeks of all-night vigils — and she was smiling now. That was all that mattered.

I left Myerstown a few hours later, stopping just before sundown outside Gettysburg to go for a run. It had stormed a half-hour earlier. Fog hung pale, ethereal pink over what had once been a battlefield. I ran along the crest of a hill, lost myself in the solemnity of it. Thoughts of life and death came and went. I kept running.

When I finished my run, I called my dad and stretched in the road by my rental as the night rolled in and a second storm threatened. I told him I’d text him when I was home and got in the car soaked through and drove the next two hours listening to the 3rd Democratic Debate. I was grateful for the distraction. It gave me something else to chat about with friends.

I dropped off the rental around midnight. On the walk home, I thought about how tomorrow, or rather today, I would get up and go to work. After some time, I concluded that was life. I'd sit behind my desk, and nobody would bother me. I'd be the same me as before I left. I'd do my work and run down the Potomac at lunch and workshop erudite, witty zingers with my buddy Jake. Somewhere in Central PA, my mom would be filming a movie. Later that night, I'd go to a dinner party.

And if that sounds bad, it isn't supposed to. To me, that’s peace. There are times to wring your fists at the sky, and there are times to say goodbye.