My brother-in-law Bruce is alive as I begin this piece. His room in California is starkly white, unmarked by prints or any sort of picture, save for a 1947 photograph of the then-Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. His favorite team, of course. I suppose it would be a cumbersome task to hang the framed photographs leaning against his nightstand; the television sits on a stand beside his bed and at the end of that is a large oxygen machine. I see a line of dust on the television, and the remote control beside it. He can’t reach it from his bed.

My last talk with Bruce happened not quite two months ago. He had had falls in his apartment, and so his daughter had promptly whisked him away to a care house. She knows her father well—a man who would stand proud and insistent on his independence. She knew that his healthcare system had declined to further treat the non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and that the time to “burn one”—Bruce’s term for smoking a cigarette—had passed. He has COPD too. And diabetes. I watch him fumble for his oxygen tubing, when he remembers.

But I hadn’t known. I knew the man I had talked to on the phone, the three-year-plus fact of his condition and, more clearly, the eminently self-determining, sometimes irascible and irreverent Bruce who told me he was going to fight. He would push himself by physical therapy to make his legs and ergo balance stronger; he would see us again in Arizona. He had his car, the prized white Lincoln he called White Lightning while I slyly termed it Snow White. After all, he took it for a weekly bath and detail. He was going to drive Snow White again, it would be in my driveway for the usual week’s visit, and we’d hear the stories of family and life while we burned a few. The best part was always the cryptic side remarks, the acerbic comments and I must admit, my enjoyment of the poking of fun at my husband, his younger brother. He would bring an impossibly large container of chocolate-drowned macadamia nuts which would provoke a guilty glee, for we knew we would eat them all by week’s end.

As his life was reduced to a small, protected space, belongings distributed, donated, and relocated elsewhere, I’m sure his daughter thought about the time he stepped in to raise her as a single parent. Taking her to her softball practice with the requisite games, dance lessons, and all the parts of life for thirteen-year-old girls in California. Now is her turn to step in.

My memories of Bruce are distinctly and naturally different from hers. I’m merely a sister-in-law, some seventeen years younger than he. But I love him. He is the big brother of my husband’s family, the steward of the family memories, and keeper of the treasured scrapbooks going back to his long-dead mother’s wedding shower. Most important to me was my inclusion by him into the family when I met him thirteen years ago. Thirteen seems to be a coincidental number in this story—I am thirteen years older than his daughter.

The strength of this inclusion, so taken for granted, gripped me as I walked into that stark room now. He is clearly dying, even as his bright blue eyes light up at my entrance. As my shock settles somewhere inside, we talk of nothing consequential while I see his stylish shirts hanging in the partially open closet. He’ll not be wearing them again. The fedora hat has dust on its rim.

While a faraway look settles into his eyes, so does my mind drift. His brothers chat while we wait for the arrival of his daughter. She’s making one of her many visits, knowing that we will be there. The anticipation is palpable because we’ve not met, though certainly I know her through the many stories and photographs he’s shared with me. She makes her own salad dressings; she’s a talented hairstylist in demand; the freezer in the care home is filled with her home-cooked meals for him. I don’t know why exactly we haven’t met until today. Geography got in the way, as did busy schedules, and the raising of children. But when she enters the room, she doesn’t disappoint. Karie sports the same elegance as her father, even in casual garb, and I’m privately delighted at the fedora perched on her head. We scan each other, we appraise, and we connect. It’s what Bruce knew would happen.

We return to the hotel after a rousing and lively restaurant visit with everyone sans Bruce. Coming from Arizona, I greedily insist that my husband, the planner, find a place that has an indoor pool. I want to sink into the warm depths despite the stink of chlorine. I know this world that Bruce is leaving, a world that clamors with claims of amazing experiences and superior service. While I would typically tolerate the disappointment if the hotel turned out to be less than amazing, on this trip, I insist that the service be excellent. Is the pool closed for renovation? Does the pool heater work? The hotel staff wearily assured me that all was in order before we committed. I want some part of this trip to be about me, a creature comfort. I can’t tolerate the shopping, the restaurants surrounding us, even though I don’t have them in my hometown. How can I think about buying “stuff” now when the vision of his shirts has pierced my brain? And when his nausea pushes past his once-desire to eat in a restaurant that is proferring now his favorite dishes to us.

This is a story within a story, one loss intermingling with another. As I floated in the warmth of the pool, I thought of the bitter words I had exchanged with my son the day before. I knew nothing about the potential of this loss when I looked upon him as a sleeping child. I thought things would always be that way, that I would always feel a remarkable and intense love. I didn’t know that someday my relevance in his life would erode, sharply perhaps, through an unwitting but steady process. You could call it letting go as they naturally evolve into their own adulthoods, but as my son absorbs himself into his new relationship, I feel as though I’ve been consigned to the past. I feel neglected when once upon a time I was, I believed, a part of his foundation. My son lives in Michigan and his psychological distance is as wide as his geographic. He knows nothing of what I’m experiencing now, and I don’t know anymore if he has room for it in his psyche as he concentrates exclusively on another’s emotional life.

How do you explain to a twenty-nine-year-old that you’ve connected with a part of yourself that knows you’ve been the self-sufficient one throughout your life, the single mom who could but now realizes that she could to such an extent that she created a capacity for others to overlook, to render a mere modicum of attention even when she thought she didn’t need it? And I don’t exactly want it. I’m simply not accustomed to it, so why would I protest its absence from him? He doesn’t know that he’s shown me by this very neglect that I do want it. Sometimes. As Bruce is dying, I want to matter, too, just like I know I mattered to Bruce without having to work to earn it. A mere sister-in-law, but one who clearly counted in his psyche. The visits when I lived in Michigan, then in Arizona, the phone calls, the sharing of his life and the sharing of confidences even when I would test his patience or his standards of conduct. Those moments would fall to the ground like a leaf without lasting impact.

I know I won’t find that again, and I know, too, that my relationship with my son has taken an irreversible turn. I must indeed let him go, to accept that he has a present in which I no longer figure largely, and for me, to fashion my responses based not on expectations but with some other philosophy. I’m far more skilled at responding to others’ needs than balancing these simultaneous personal losses.

Yet the anger is good. It keeps me afloat. It is a luxury of sentiment that helps me as it fills a place that would otherwise sink into a place I might not be able to leave. I’m aware that I’m justifying myself; I know it won’t last, but I know, too, that it is keeping me strong. I’m leaning on its presence.

It’s our last day to see Bruce. Ruby, the beloved only grandchild, is tired. And possibly bored as well in that stark room crowded with adults while hospice beckons Karie outside for death discussions. Ruby is the proverbial apple of his eye. I notice that while she wilts, that faraway look again takes hold of Bruce’s eyes despite her presence. We decide to go for a walk, to explore the immediate neighborhood, she and I.

We’ll look for interesting rocks that she might be able to paint, and who knows? Maybe an errant dollar bill or some other treasure. And so we walk carefully, inspecting the manicured streets that yield nothing save for a small snail shell that Ruby deems sufficiently clean to pocket. I ask her what she thinks about Grandpa being here, in this place, where she must travel two hours to see him.

“Well,” she says with the nonchalant acceptance of a nine-year-old, “he’s quite old, you know.” I tell her that I plan to ask her grandpa to send me and her a sign that he’s okay when he leaves this world. Ruby enthusiastically recounts a book she’s read in which an orphaned girl asks for signs from her dead parents. A piece of sea glass appears as a sign from the girl’s mother, but Ruby cannot remember what sign the father sends, though she’s certain that he did. We continue our search and score a granite-looking rock that has the potential of sparkle should it be scrubbed well. She’s a prescient child—she leaves the rock outside the care home because she has noticed that there isn’t much room. And I suspect her mother has taught her to be clean, to leave dirty rocks outside until they find a proper place to be contained. It shows me both the mother and grandfather in her.

It is time to say goodbye. The emotional look in Bruce’s eyes tells me that he is profoundly grateful that the connection finally occurred, that I will see Ruby grow up beyond the confines of his cellphone. His dying has brought that gift of love to me again through his daughter and granddaughter. What isn’t said will be wept and the eyes of the dying will tell you if only you will look.

I shove my husband into the room for a last, private time with Bruce. And then it is my turn. We lock our gaze at each other while the pools gathering in our eyes tell us that we both know it will be the last time we will see each other. It doesn’t need words. As I said to Ruby, I now say to Bruce that she and I want a sign. At first, he doesn’t comprehend but an imperceptible nod signals he does when I explain.

The drive back to Arizona is long. We stop for gas as the profundity of those scenes recede in the distance. A text message appears from my son, telling me that he is thinking of me and “love ya ma.” The anger has left a film, it wants to cling a bit more, and so I can’t feel better—I feel something that is possibly relief but I don’t respond. I cannot think of him right now. I’m oddly aglow with the family reconnection in California even while the specter of death rides in the car with us.

No, Bruce—there won’t be physical therapy and you can’t fight this. You won’t come to visit me again and indeed the phone never rings again until five days later after he took his last breath quietly in that room, the pictures yet unhung. The notification call comes on a Friday at 9:02 p.m.

I work the next day. It’s Saturday, so there are only a few clients. Visions of Bruce’s room insist that I think of that empty bed. Did they usher the other residents to their rooms when the gurney arrived? How carefully did they wrap his body in the white sheet? While his brightly patterned shirts still hung in the closet.

I wonder what sign Ruby will receive. I hope to talk to my son when I return home. And we do talk–there’s an undertone of commitment even though it feels still uncertain to me.

A week after his death, on Friday at 9:02 p.m., his daughter texts me a picture of a Dodgers keychain that Ruby won at an arcade earlier that night.

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