Chapter 8
Henry
The day that Jacob died, I didn’t wear a watch.
I knew that I would be checking it constantly, which is an outlandish concept—how many times do you check your watch while you’re waiting for someone to die?
Instead, I sat beside him, a constant vigil.
I had spent weeks reading to him in this very spot, but today there was no reading.
Grief had stolen my voice. I held Jacob’s hand, and it felt heavy as he lay motionless in the hospital bed.
Every so often I would fall asleep and then awake with a start, thinking perhaps he’d gone and I hadn’t had the chance to tell him I loved him one more time.
I wanted those to be the last words he ever heard; a reminder of how much he was loved.
The room was warm. I’d opened the curtains to let in the sunlight.
I noticed the flowers along the windowsill had begun to wither.
I felt guilty for not replacing them, but I couldn’t leave his side.
He looked small beneath the thin white sheets, almost as if he’d faded overnight.
His hair was gone. Jacob and I had both inherited our father’s thick curls.
Dad would run his fingers through his hair when he was stressed, and we’d both picked up the habit.
At this point, Jacob had lost even that privilege.
He hadn’t wanted our parents to see him like this, to remember him this way.
But I’d called them anyway, telling them it probably wouldn’t be long.
They were trying to get a flight, to make it in time.
It’s strange, time, isn’t it? I ached at the thought that Jacob was slipping away, moving toward somewhere none of us could follow.
Every so often the nurses would come into the room.
They would offer me things like water, tea, magazines, a crossword puzzle, perhaps to go and sit in the room down the hall and watch some TV.
But it all seemed trivial. Was I really going to sit there asking “part of a transformer” for five letters while my brother was taking his last breaths? I thought not.
Jacob had barely eaten anything but Jell-O all week.
I’d fed it to him as he lay exhausted against the pillows.
I’d run ice chips across his lips and moisturized his dry hands.
His palliative care consisted of a constant rotation of medications and painkillers.
They would be interchanged, increased and decreased and swapped out.
He had cried in discomfort or pain sometimes and then the nurses would fiddle with his IV bag and suddenly he would go quiet, and the cries would stop.
This had felt at first like a never-ending cycle, but now I knew the cycle would end.
This is what I had come to accept. There would be no miracles now.
We were not fighting or hoping, we were just waiting.
One of the nurses had come into the room and checked on his vitals, stroking Jacob’s arm gently.
“We’re doing all we can to keep him comfortable,” she reassured me.
But not alive, I thought, because we were beyond that point now.
But Jacob didn’t seem to be in any pain that day.
His breathing had become shallower, and his skin had changed.
It had been yellow for so many months as a result of the treatment, but he had turned a pale gray, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be much longer.
I’d thought about what Jacob would have wanted to know in his last moments.
Would he want his favorite song—“Viva la Vida” by Coldplay—playing?
Would he want to smell pine needles, because all he ever did was hike?
Would he want me to remind him of that time when we were kids and we’d found a twenty dollar bill while playing in the park?
We’d debated over whether to turn it in or spend it on candy, but eventually we did turn it in to the sheriff, who accompanied us to the candy store and let us buy whatever we wanted, a reward for being honest. I’d settled on my original plan, to talk to him softly, to tell him that I loved him as he slipped away.
As it happens, I love you wasn’t the last thing I had said to him; instead I’d said: I’m just going to get you a coffee.
He wasn’t really conscious by then—I knew that—but I’d said it anyway.
It felt stupid and symbolic all at once, but I wanted to give him something normal, something he loved, even if it was just the idea of it.
When I had returned, the nurse was in the room.
She’d looked at me knowingly and touched my shoulder, as I slumped into the chair again next to Jacob’s body.
“Do you want a minute?” she’d asked.
“I’ll just have a coffee with my brother,” I’d replied.
And I had—I drank that coffee next to Jacob. It almost made me puke. He would have thought that was brilliant.
By the time the formalities were done, and the undertaker called, it was just after three in the afternoon.
I’d left the hospital, and walked into the sunlight, and the world had felt different.
The sun was warm, but it didn’t feel warm to me; I felt cold.
The streets around the hospital were busy, but people’s faces were blurry, as if I was hoping that somehow one of them would be Jacob and all of this had just been some long, drawn-out nightmare.
I’d left with some of Jacob’s things, and his hospital bag, and it had felt as though it was filled with boulders.
I drove home from Norvale, where the hospital was, to Everston in silence.
When I returned to an empty house, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep.
How was it fair that Jacob would now sleep forever—lost to the world—while I still had the privilege to close my eyes, drift into dreams, and wake up to another day he’d never see?
Three days after Jacob’s funeral, a delivery came for me. It was a brand-new coffee machine, and a note from Jacob: “Isn’t it lovely.”
I laughed out loud. It was such a Jacob thing to do. For the first time since his passing, I thought of him and smiled. The absurdity of it all, that even in death, he had found a way for one final prank. I’d give anything to tell him one last time, I’m still never drinking coffee.
In the weeks that followed, the condolences poured in.
Bright flowers, homemade casseroles, lasagnes left quietly on my doorstep.
I had texts from people I hadn’t heard from in years.
Regular library patrons would stop by the front desk, offering soft words, unsure if I wanted them.
I appreciated all of it. Truly. But none of it filled the hole Jacob had left behind.
There were so many who could empathize with the loss of my brother, as my sibling—but not the grief of losing a twin.
We were innately “us” before we had even entered the world.
Our lives had always been parallel, intertwined.
Jacob knew what I was thinking before I said it.
The loss of him created a vacuum, and it rewrote the very shape of my existence.
It was the kind of grief that carved jagged edges where once there was certainty.
I wasn’t just grieving him, I was grieving the part of me that only existed because he did.
The hardest part came in sifting through his belongings.
I found all sorts of things, some I expected, and others I really didn’t.
Like the chemo bag he wore, or the hoodie he took to both the clinic and then the hospital, which he called his cancer uniform.
I’d bought him a thermos for his cold water—the only thing he could bear to drink during chemo—with the word “coffee” printed on it as a little joke.
He thought it was hilarious, and the day I found it in his wardrobe, I sobbed for hours.
It felt like I couldn’t or shouldn’t keep those things, but I couldn’t possibly throw them away either.
It was the dilemma I was facing now, staring down at the very last box of Jacob’s things that I had been holding on to.
Should I keep them, or discard them? What if throwing them away meant I would forget the way he looked in that hoodie, or the silly war we had over his love for coffee and my disdain for it?
I thought about asking Max and the group that evening.
Maybe they would know what to do when holding on starts to feel just as painful as letting go.
When it came to our meetings, the library was the only true home for them, and I was thrilled the readers’ corner was back up and running after three weeks.
Winnie had even made a lemon meringue pie to celebrate our return, and I couldn’t wait for a slice of its tangy richness.
At six p.m. on the dot, Rita bustled in with Bobby and Gill, her hands waving about, telling a story that sounded grandiose but in reality was probably about her neighbor’s pumpkins growing along her side of the fence.
Winnie and Emerson arrived together, deep in conversation; I’d wager a guess it was probably about birds or poetry.
Julian arrived carrying a cardboard box and a backpack, and he motioned to me as he sat it down on the table.
“Henry,” he said, his voice a little higher pitched than usual. “I need your help.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My kid,” he said. “Her science fair is tomorrow, and we stayed up all last night working on her project together, but the dog wrecked it this morning and she is just devastated. You got anything I can replace it with?”
I paused momentarily to make sure I had heard him correctly. “You need some sort of science project that she can take to school?”
Julian nodded. “Please Henry, Lesley’s not doing so great, and she didn’t have time today to redo it, and work was just chaotic and I—”
I held up my hands. “You know, I think we actually have some leftover projects from the World Science Day we just hosted. I’ll see what I can do.”