Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to quiet. I like it. More than that, I’ve come to need it. If stillness was a drug, I’d be a junkie. My body demands the periodic injection of solitude and silence.

I haven’t had it for the last couple of weeks.

You’d think sitting around a hospice room for hours with somebody who is heavily medicated against pain would be quiet. It’s not. For ten thousand reasons, it’s not. The hospice staff are always in motion. Visitors come and go. There’s always the sound of the hospital: the trundling of med-carts, the alarms, the clang and shuffle of housekeeping crews, the hiss-thwok of suction pumps. And, of course, even though he’s heavily medicated the brother still requires attention. There’s not much left of him now. His body is wasting away; his voice is just a thin, papery whisper; he sleeps most of the time. But now and then he opens his eyes and looks around—and when he does, I want him to see somebody who loves him.

The hospice has a second-floor balcony. Walls of glass shield it from wind and rain, but it’s open at the top to allow a bit of breeze. Sparrows fly in and out, and nest in some of the beams. They’re a messy bird, sparrows, but cheery and it’s pleasant to hear them.

We take the brother out to the balcony when he’s up to it. He sits and looks at the trees and listens to the sparrows, and appears to pay attention to our conversation. When he’s tired himself out—after fifteen or twenty minutes—and he’s being wheeled back to his room, I like to linger for a moment.

It’s not enough. It’s not enough for him or for me. But it’ll have to do.

Family is a weird thing. This is Scott. Technically, he’s my cousin. In spirit, he’s something more like a brother. In fact, a few months ago my actual brother Jesse Eugene said this to me: “Don’t take this the wrong way–but you were gone for years and Scotty sort of took your place as my little brother.”

He’s been a good little brother (though, truth be told, it’s a wee bit difficult to think of Scott as a ‘little’ anything, given that he’s got the bulk and mass of a Sherman tank).

I shot this photograph in Jesse Eugene’s room at the hospice. Scott had just arrived (he’s been there every day) and sat down. The light from the window fell on his face and I sort of demanded he not move for a moment. We hadn’t really spoken at that point, other than to say hello. After shooting the photograph Scott told me he’d just heard that his best friend had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Wyoming.

It’s been a tough few days all around. There he was, sitting in the room where his ‘brother’ was slowly dying, thinking about his friend. And yet when asked to sit for a photo, Scott just quietly went along with it. Which is what brothers do.

I always knew I had a daughter.  It wasn’t a surprise or anything. I was married for a while, after all, and that’s what happens when you get married. You have daughters. But I was also divorced, and that’s what happens when you get divorced. Daughters move away with their mothers.

And then after a while you move away, and then one move leads to another and you get farther apart and in the pre-internet days the odds for miscommunication (which are pretty high in divorce situations anyway) expand geometrically. Pretty soon miscommunication is replaced by non-communication. So I knew I had a daughter. But she was more a daughter in theory than in practice.

And let’s face it—you adjust to that. You can adjust to almost anything. You adjust to a new city, you adjust to a new job, you adjust to being single, you adjust to being not-a-parent. People ask “Do you have kids?” and at first you say “Yes.” Then later it becomes “Yes, but…” After a while it becomes “Not really” because it’s easier and quicker than explaining all the events that led to that ‘not really.’  And eventually you don’t say anything—you just shake your head, because the cold and ugly truth is you don’t. You may have fathered a child, but to say you ‘have kids’ is a lie. You don’t.

Having kids isn’t passing along your DNA to another living being. Having kids is also them having you. Having you there. I wasn’t there.

Yesterday, at the hospice center where my brother is slowly dying, I met my daughter for the first time in a couple of decades. It wasn’t the most ideal circumstance for such a meeting. And yet, it was absolutely the most ideal circumstance for such a meeting.

To say it was weird is to diminish the term ‘weird.’ To say it was surreal would be to stretch surreality all out of proportion. To say it was wonderful is to turn ‘wonderful’ into a tiny little speck of a word. It was more of all those things than those words could possibly convey.

So I met my daughter. I saw theory become reality. Once again I ‘have kids’ and she has me. Of course, it’s not that simple or easy. It is, in fact, strange and confusing and messy and complicated. And wonderful. Full of wonder.

And then we left the hospice and went bowling.

About a year ago my brother Jesse Eugene was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We were told he had maybe six months to live. He exceeded expectations, though it didn’t go easy for him. In the course of the last year he went from being around 235 pounds to about 145. He became increasingly feeble. It wasn’t pretty.

Yesterday we were at the hospital for a routine visit with his primary care physician and a consultation with the oncologist. The lab work revealed that his hemoglobin was extremely low, so they decided to give him a quick transfusion and send him home. After more discussion, the doctors decided it might be best to keep him overnight to see how he responded to the transfusion. Almost immediately after being admitted, he began to vomit blood. Lots of blood. Liters of blood.

They don’t have emesis basins anymore–those kidney-shaped pans you see in the movies. Now they have blue mesh vomit bags. Red blood in a blue bag. It’s another image I’d rather not have in my head. I already have too many of those.

For a while he was vomiting blood as quickly as they could transfuse it. I held the bag, he vomited, and every time the blood hit the liter mark I’d hand it to a nurse to measure and record. Input/output. Blood goes in, blood goes out. Eventually the vomiting stopped long enough for them to insert a naso-gastric tube into his stomach and pump the blood out.

The bleeding seems to have stopped for now. Or slowed to a negligible level. But it’ll start up again. It’s inevitable. With the NG tube in place, we’ll be spared the vomiting, but the bleeding will still take place. We’ve decided to stop any more transfusions. At some point in the near future the loss of blood will make him light-headed, then he’ll lose consciousness and die. It might be tonight. It might be a week from tonight. It probably won’t be as long as two weeks.

Part of me hopes it’s sooner than later. This is not how he wanted to die–slowly, messily, in a hospital. But how many people ever get what they want?

So I was sitting on a bench in the shade outside the public library, and this woman came up to me and said this: “Can I pray for you?”

I was a wee bit taken aback by the sheer impertinence of the request. What made her single me out as the recipient of her prayers (there were other people sitting nearby)? What made her think her prayers would be particularly helpful? What made her believe it was perfectly appropriate to interrupt my reading so she could address a request to her Invisible Friend in the Clouds to look over me? How would she have felt if I’d interrupted her prayers in order to recite a passage from the novel I was reading?

But at the same time I was sort of touched that she wanted to help a stranger, even if the stranger didn’t ask for, want, or need her help. While I found her arrogance and impertinence annoying and offensive, I was sort of moved by her sincerity.

So I said “Sure, go ahead on, pray away.” And she did. Then smiled and went away, leaving me sitting there feeling both touched and annoyed, and more than a little creeped out.