On the Imminent Death of My Grandfather

On the Imminent Death of My Grandfather

I watch him sleep, his chest rising and falling like waves on a distant shore. The machines keep time with his fading heartbeat, a metronome counting down moments we no longer measure in days.

His hands, once strong enough to build a home, now rest like fallen leaves on white sheets. I remember those hands teaching me to fish, to tie knots that would never come undone.

The doctors speak in hushed tones outside, their words like stones dropping into still water. They talk of time as if it were a currency we’ve nearly spent to the last coin.

In the quiet between his labored breaths, I hear the stories he told me as a child, tales of a homeland I’ve never seen, carried across oceans in the vessel of his memory.

Tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after that, he will become a photograph on the mantel, a name etched in stone, a space at the table where shadows gather instead of laughter.

But today, I sit beside him, holding vigil, memorizing the map of veins on his hands, the rhythm of his breathing, the particular way light falls across his face in the afternoon.