THE LONELIEST ROOM IN THE WORLD

There's a particular loneliness that comes with sitting beside someone who's dying.

I've experienced it more times than I care to count.

The room is usually quiet, save for the mechanical sounds of medical equipment.

The occasional interruption from a nurse.

The labored breathing of someone you once knew as strong, capable, and full of life.

Time behaves differently in these rooms.

Hours pass without anything happening.

Then something happens and you find yourself wishing for those uneventful hours again.

And no matter how many people are in the room, you are, in a profound way, alone.

A wife is losing her husband.

A daughter is losing her father.

A son is losing a man he spent much of his life trying to understand.

They're sitting in the same room, but they're not having the same experience.

Whatever you're feeling. . .

You feel it alone.

My father and I had a complicated relationship.

We spent years estranged from one another.

His declining health eventually brought us back into each other's lives.

But we never fully recovered what we'd lost.

I loved him.

I know he loved me.

But love doesn't always overcome the distance that grows between people.

Particularly when that distance has been accumulating for decades.

The first time I received a call telling me to come say goodbye to my father, I was standing in my bedroom looking at the lifeless body of my beloved dog, Anook.

I had just discovered him.

I hadn't even begun to grieve when I found myself boarding a plane to say goodbye to someone else I loved.

But my father somehow survived. . .

. . .and so began a seventeen-year ritual.

Emergency phone calls. Hurried flights.

Doctors. Nurses. Hospital rooms.

. . .and what I believed, each time, would be our final goodbye.

He'd improve a little. Then stabilize.

And then came the awful question.

How long do I stay?

Because life doesn't stop simply because someone you love is dying.

There are jobs. Bills. Responsibilities.

People waiting for you.

A life that continues moving forward, indifferent to the fact that yours has come to a standstill.

I'd stay as long as I could.

Sometimes longer than I could afford.

And when I finally left, I'd carry the familiar dread that he might die while I was gone.

Seventeen years of learning that loving someone and knowing what to do about it are two entirely different things.

A few weeks ago, as summer gave way to autumn, I reached out to two of my closest friends.

Fall has always brought with it a desire to reconnect after the adventures and distractions of summer.

I hadn't spoken to one friend in a few weeks.

The other, in several months.

By an extraordinary coincidence, both were preparing to travel across the country to sit beside a dying parent.

My buddy was flying from Hawaii to Texas.

His father had entered hospice.

A week later, my girlfriend in Los Angeles was boarding a plane for New Jersey.

Her mother had taken a sudden turn and was also entering hospice.

Both had complicated relationships with their parents.

Both were racing against time hoping to see them again before they died.

Fortunately, both made it.

And I found myself watching two people I love enter a room I knew all too well.

I spoke with my buddy almost every day.

Sometimes we talked about his father.

Sometimes we talked about the complicated history between them.

Sometimes we just shot the shit.

I knew how lonely those hours could become.

I also knew there wasn't much I could say that would make any of it easier.

I'd spent seventeen years in similar rooms and still couldn't produce a particularly useful piece of wisdom about death.

But as the days passed, something happened.

My friend began spending time with the man who owned the ranch where his father had been living.

They'd take a few hours to ride four-wheelers, explore the property, shoot guns.

And my buddy felt a little guilty about it.

He was there to be with his dying father.

Wasn't that what he was supposed to be doing?

I recognized the question immediately.

I'd asked myself some version of it dozens of times.

So I told him something I wished someone had told me years earlier.

Go ride the four-wheeler.

Go laugh. Get some fresh air.

Enjoy yourself for a couple of hours.

Your father is being cared for. He isn't being abandoned.

And neither are you.

Later, when the days stretched into weeks, another question emerged.

When is it okay to go home?

My friend had a business to run. Children to care for. Financial obligations.

A life that couldn't remain indefinitely suspended.

His father's condition was unpredictable. It might be hours. Days. Weeks.

I knew that particular purgatory intimately.

And so I told him something else.

You've done enough.

You've shown up.

You've held his hand.

You've cared for him in ways neither of you could have imagined.

You've sat through the uncomfortable hours and confronted the difficult truths.

You've been his son.

Going home doesn't undo any of that.

Because love doesn't become more legitimate simply because it costs you more.

And staying until your own life begins to unravel isn't necessarily devotion.

Sometimes it's self-erasure disguised as empathy.

I don't know whether my words changed anything.

Necessity had already made the decision for him.

But I hope they relieved him of some of the guilt that I felt every time I’d leave my dad to return to my own life.

Instructions tell people what to do.

Permission tells them they're not wrong for being human.

And I wonder how many men are walking around waiting for permission they'll never receive.

Permission to grieve.

To be frightened.

To stop trying to repair something that may never be repaired.

Permission to forgive themselves.

We do this in our businesses. In friendships. In our marriages.

We confuse the magnitude of our sacrifice with the magnitude of our love.

But love is not measured by how much you suffer.

My other friend is a formidable woman.

Smart. Successful. Tough.

She's spent much of her professional life navigating difficult people and complicated situations.

She's exceptionally good at it.

When we first spoke, she told me she was okay.

Her relationship with her mother had been complicated, but they'd done some important work repairing it in recent years.

I was glad to hear that.

And I believed her when she said she was okay.

Mostly.

Then, a few days later, I received a text.

This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

I understood.

Of course it was.

But then she told me something that moved me more than almost anything else she'd said.

She'd gone out and bought her mother a bottle of Chanel No. 5.

Her favorite perfume.

Her mother was no longer conscious.

She was sleeping through what would likely be her final days.

My friend sprayed the perfume on her anyway.

She hoped that somewhere inside that sleeping woman, the familiar fragrance might bring a little happiness.

I sat with that image for a while.

A daughter beside her dying mother.

A bottle of perfume.

An act of love that required no acknowledgment, no gratitude, no response.

Nothing to be gained.

Nothing to be fixed.

Just a small kindness offered to someone who might never know it had been given.

And I realized something.

My friend had stopped trying to be okay.

She was allowing herself to hurt.

And in doing so, she was allowing herself to love without the protection of pretending this wasn't breaking her heart.

We sometimes mistake composure for strength.

But being unaffected isn't necessarily the same thing as being strong.

Sometimes strength looks like admitting that something hurts more than you imagined it would.

Sometimes it looks like a grown woman buying her dying mother perfume.

Neither of my friends had an uncomplicated relationship with the parent they were losing.

Neither did I.

And there's something particularly cruel about the death of a parent with whom you've spent years trying to build, repair, or recover a relationship.

Because you're not just losing the person.

You're losing the possibility of who that person might someday become to you.

We sometimes spend decades waiting for our fathers to become the men we needed when we were boys.

And then, one day, they're dying.

The possibility of that transformation dies with them.

There may be no final conversation that makes sense of the years.

No acknowledgment of the hurt.

No reconciliation that puts everything right.

And perhaps there doesn't need to be.

You can love someone without understanding them.

You can care for someone without excusing them.

And you can say goodbye without pretending everything was okay.

That's not a failure of reconciliation.

Sometimes it's the most honest expression of love we have left to offer.

For years, I thought the measure of a man was how much he could endure.

How much weight he could carry.

How much hardship he could withstand.

How much of himself he could give before he finally broke.

I'm less convinced of that now.

I've known men who survived extraordinary hardship only to become hardened by it.

Men who mistook their scars for wisdom and their emotional distance for strength.

I understand the temptation.

When you've been hurt enough, becoming difficult to hurt again can feel like an accomplishment.

But there's another possibility.

What if the point of surviving difficult things isn't merely to become harder to hurt?

What if it's to become better at recognizing hurt in others?

I spent seventeen years learning things I wouldn't have chosen to learn.

I learned what it feels like to sit beside a father you love but never fully understood.

To wonder whether you've stayed long enough.

To leave with the knowledge that the next phone call might be the last.

I learned how lonely those rooms can be.

And recently, when a man I love found himself in one of them, I knew something about what he was feeling.

I couldn't save his father.

I couldn't resolve the complicated history between them.

I couldn't make any of it less painful.

But I could call him.

I could listen.

I could laugh with him.

And when he needed to go home, I could tell him it was okay.

I think about all the years I spent wishing my father and I could find our way back to one another.

All the things I wanted from him that neither of us quite knew how to give.

And I wonder whether I spent so much time waiting for him to become the father I needed that I overlooked the man those years were teaching me to become.

Not a man who no longer needs anyone.

Not a man who has learned to endure everything alone.

But a man who understands that sometimes the most generous thing we can offer another person is permission to be human.

To hurt.

To leave.

To love someone imperfectly.

To stop trying to prove that love through suffering.

I couldn't change what happened between my father and me.

I couldn't recover the years we'd lost.

But when another man found himself sitting in the loneliest room in the world, I could offer him something I once needed myself.

Someone who understood.