Slack left the lamp on a table under the sash window and silently withdrew, closing the door. The window was open. I studied the delicate mullions that divided the panes into a grid. The breeze was warm and welcome. It wafted through the opening and the flame guttered.

I was alone with my father. His breaths were shallow, slight.

I spoke to him, low and soft. I cannot remember now precisely what I said: the terror of the hill was raw in me and I was exhausted. But I recall—or I want to believe—that I wandered through our years together, talked about how his tenderness had turned into my care of him; how I’d sorrowed for him when shame and sickness plagued him, how it was love that drove me on.

A breath would answer me when I stopped my murmuring, a tiny exchange of air between the room and his body. Enough that I could see his lip move, his chest rise and fall.

I imagined his wife, my mother, as a mountain of love and courage. I told him I was sorry for my impatience, for the deception wrought upon him by Gideon with me as his unwitting accomplice. I hope I told him he’d led a good life and would leave goodness behind.

An answering breath that had no force in it.

Several things, I now realise, mark a life in completeness: to laugh and cry, to hurt and forgive and remember and forget and to couple with another body. Perhaps, among these, to live one day through a vigil for the dying. The wrenching separation of living and dead, I now believe, is the necessary price of having loved. This, then, was the night that came for me. I spoke softly, the sleep tugged at me and I resisted, prayed and bargained with an unresponsive God.

A fractional movement of his throat: another breath. It held there then sighed away, fainter than the one previous, and so far from it that I began to wonder how I would know which was the last.

The lamp sputtered on in its buttery stench. My father descended far from me. I placed a hand on his chest to search for rise or fall. I listened by his mouth. I could not know if the moment would be marked somehow: a gasp, a locking of the flesh. How far apart could these breaths become? Would life finish on an inhalation, a breath kept forever?

A breath, tiny. The sigh of release.

And now I waited. It seemed forever, it seemed that I stopped breathing myself, that I lost the measure of time. No further breath ever came.

~

Somewhere before dawn I had laid my head on his chest to hear the silence where his heartbeat had been. I’d fallen asleep there, and this time the sleep had me firmly.