Chapter 2 — Julian[]
Julian was dying of heart failure.
He was frail, and he always looked exhausted, worn thin by the long slow work of a heart giving out.
But somehow, whenever I came to see him, he still managed to smile, a gentle, warm, unhurried smile that seemed to come from somewhere the illness could not reach.
We began to talk.
And there was something in our conversations, from the very first, that surprised us both, a quality of ease and depth that does not usually arrive between strangers, and certainly not quickly.
Within just a few days, those conversations had become the thing I most looked forward to, and, I could tell, the thing he most looked forward to as well.
He was a good listener, and a thoughtful talker, and there was a kind of quiet wisdom in him, worn smooth by long years, that drew me in.
I did not know, then, anything real about him.
He presented himself to the hospital staff, and to me, as a man entirely alone in the world, a forgotten soul with no living kin, and I had no reason to doubt it, because it was exactly the kind of person I had spent a year sitting beside.
I thought I was comforting a lonely old man in his final days.
I did not know that the lonely old man had lived a whole enormous life, full of love and craft and unbearable loss, and that he was, in those unhurried conversations, quietly deciding that I was the person he had been waiting decades to find.
