Chapter 4Before the Light Fades

The day the doctor told me my stomach cancer had been caught too late, that it had already spread throughout my body, I sat on a bench in the hospital corridor for the entire afternoon.

A television mounted in the corner was replaying an episode of Today's Focus, the interview Julian had given a few days prior.

The cold-eyed man didn't want to waste a moment on anything outside of his research. Even when asked about his wife, he was brief.

"I am, for lack of a better word, a block of wood."

"I don't understand love. My wife… to me, she is more of a responsibility."

"Do we celebrate anniversaries? That's just formalism. I would rather spend that time running a few more experiments."

That sounded exactly like him. Forget anniversaries; he didn't even celebrate birthdays.

When I was younger, I used to pester him about it, hoping that one day he would appear before me holding a bouquet of radiant roses.

But I never once received a single rose. The mind that could commit countless data points to memory simply refused to retain the four digits of my birthdate.

Eventually, I learned to sit alone at the table with a bowl of noodles and call it a celebration.

Julian was a stone tree that could never blossom. It took me over twenty years to finally accept that truth. In recent years, I'd started to feel that something was wrong with me, too. Call it exhaustion or surrender, it didn't matter.

It was laughable, really. He is he, and I am I. He had laid that simple truth before me decades ago, and only now did I finally understand it.

I folded the diagnosis into a small square, tucked it into my pocket, and called my son.