89 years

I sit in a room with my dying grandfather.

The only sounds are his rhythmic breathing and the soft ticking of the clock on the wall. The sun has gone down, and the cheery light no longer filters through the blinds. The harsh fluorescent light in the room contrasts sharply with the rural North Carolina darkness outside. There is only a single light in the room, and it brightly illuminates my grandmother's snow white hair and brings a greenish tint to her wrinkled skin.

Two of my aunts are here as well, as well as my mom and dad. My brother is away in Michigan, and had the same reaction I did when I heard the news: a vaguely apprehensive confusion.

Grandpa had a stroke? Say what...?

The doctors said that he had only a few hours left, so we all rushed here as fast as we could. But hours pass, and he lies in the hospital bed underneath the fluorescent light, and his breathing continues, rhythmic and strong. My aunts are back in the room now, and the conversation has resumed. Mom wears her usual look of unflappable calm, though it is tempered by empathy today: the Chinese believe that the separation of soul and body that occurs when a person dies is acutely painful, and that a dying person ought not to be touched or spoken to.

"A mountain sits on his chest," she tells me softly, where the others cannot hear, and tells me of the Chinese belief that a dying person is scoured by earth, water, fire, and wind before passing away. Wind is the final phase, she says, and the most painful. "Ah mi tuo fuo," she says, repeating the Buddhist prayer quietly, musically. "Ah mi tuo fuo. That is all you should say." She turns away, and walks down the hall, continuing to pray for him.

I return to the room, where the bright sound of Dancing With the Stars blares from the TV, and stare at grandpa's sunken cheeks. He will never regain consciousness, they told me, and he has no chance of recovery. So we are here to make him comfortable, and stare at him and each other as we wait for him to die.