I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.

I said: can you hear everything they say around you?

One blink.

Something went through me that I have not been able to describe since, and it was not pity.

It was the understanding that a man had been lying in that room for two months listening to his own nephew choose hymns.

By lunchtime his lips could move a little. I put my ear against his mouth and I could feel the words more than hear them.

He said: Christo isn’t waiting for my money.

Then, after about a minute, because it cost him that much: he’s speeding it up.

Eight words and one more, and it took him nearly two minutes of a four-hour window.

I have thought about what I would have spent that window on. There are about four hundred things I would have said first — help me, get a doctor, ring the police, where is my sister.

He spent it on a diagnosis of his own family.

That is either the clearest thinking I have ever encountered or it is a man who had had fifty-six nights to draft one sentence, and I have decided it is the second one and that the second one is more frightening.