Drinking coffee in St. Louis airport, I am surrounded by travelers all in masks. The airport is cold, as if the weather just changed and they haven’t turned on the heat yet. I am on my way to DC, and then after, to Maine to see my dad before he dies.

He is lying in a hospital bed in that strange transitory space in between life and death; the self is in neither place, almost hovering between. I remember this in the couple of days before Cody’s grandma died. She stopped speaking, hospice stopped giving her water because she had stopped eating, her skin began to change, and then she slowly passed away over the course of one full day.

It is strange to think that parents die. Grandparents dying seems to make more sense: they are old, and old people die. But when parents die we have to acknowledge that we, too, are aging. We, too, will become old. We, too, have limited time.

I feel strangely tired, drained, spacey? I don’t know how to describe it.