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I had just watched her father die. And now here I was, after all the mortal drama I’d participated in, taking out the bathroom trash while she sat stunned in the dining room, feet away, watching me. Silently between us was her father’s death, which I knew intimately but she could only imagine. She had not made it to the bedside in time. Such a strange moment - a paradox of separation and intimacy, profundity and mundanity. We were intangibly yet powerfully connected through vastly different experiences of her father. She was not ready to talk or be held, being rather stoic like her father, and so the known and unknown bond between us went unremarked upon. But that odd moment struck my heart, feeling the bewilderment, the pain, the love, those human interconnections and disconnections, life and death moving through all of us.

I took the trash out, brought her a cup of tea, and then went upstairs to prepare her father’s body for her to say goodbye to.