When you greet us at the Starbucks on a sunny afternoon, you may think we are doing better, but we are not. My mom still has his toothbrush. She still smells his clothes. I don’t know if that is weird because I do the same. I can see how the toothbrush might be weird, but throwing it away, watching the frayed bristles land and mingle with a brown banana peel and gooey tissues, seems wrong. Wrong like leaving an animal to die on the side of the road. She still talks to him when she watches TV. I listened to my dad say he loves me on my voicemail four times yesterday. When we get together, we eat Chinese takeout and drink hot tea and watch a movie my dad never saw. We talk about how much he would have liked it.

At the end, we drifted around his bed like planets: kissing his forehead, bringing water to his flaking lips, holding his hand. Our lives still revolve around him. We are floating aimlessly—reaching for each other, grazing fingertips, moving on.