A couple who look like they’ve been together for a very long time sit in a waiting room at the Western Hospital. The man looks anxious and uncomfortable, maybe even angry, and his wife will not intrude upon that. Holding her purse primly– like she was in church– she sits with her knees together staring straight ahead. She will not say a word. She will not move a muscle. They don’t look at one another. The tension in their lives a living thing, a creature that travels great distances and will not go away.

And in the foyer there is a Book and Bake sale taking place. A very skinny woman in a motorized wheelchair is looking at the cupcakes. She’s wearing a pink kerchief on her head, in honour of Valentine’s Day, and she is thumbing through a book called Rogue Angel.

All the donated books there. Books thumbed through on beach vacations, books that changed lives or passed right through them. All these stories moving through time, intersecting, and ultimately reducing to the same story: How will I live, how will I die? And at the kiosk beside, there is a long lineup for the Lotto 6/49. Doctors and patients alike. Pretty nurses are scrolling their phones as they wait, men in hospital gowns clutching IV stands, people visiting loved ones. Each person having a plan for the money, each one hoping for something–a candy apple red Corvette, a promising drug, some safe horizon. Past them and outside, through slush and snow I step into a taxi. I am tired and my oxygen tubing has caught on the door, and as I am trying to disentangle it, the sudden astonishment of a female driver speaking to me. Her accented voice from far away, the subtle trace of her perfume, like light falling on water.

The elderly husband is in a wheelchair being pushed through the hospital by his elderly wife. They’ve probably been married for 60 years, but he’s presently vanishing before her eyes. No longer the man she met chasing a dog down a street so many years ago. Now he’s frail and stooped, his shoulders curling forward as if some magnet within his body was  compelling them together. But in spite of this, in spite of his immobility, the hospital slippers, IV bag and bruises crawling up his legs, he’s trying to be cheerful, trying to make the best of things. He says something to his wife, but his voice is a whisper and she can’t hear him. He tries again and it’s the same result. And then he stops trying to talk, and the two of them, so bound, move in silence toward whatever comes next.