Everything around me in the hospital was cast in a kind of perpetual, shimmering twilight. Sounds fruity to say that, but it’s true. It would be twilight as I was falling asleep; I’d wake up and it would somehow still be twilight. No matter what time of day it was, the shadows were always long and dramatic in St. Paul’s, the sun outside always seemingly close to going down. I didn’t understand it then, but I was becoming more and more untethered to time. I was leaving behind the things that normally bound me to the world—clocks and calendars and the Internet and so on. I didn’t care if it was Monday, Friday or Wednesday; if it was the middle of the night or lunchtime; or if it was my birthday even, which it really was during the early days of my hospital stay. Because up ahead there was always more of that seductive, delicate twilight. And more twilight always meant more sleep for me.

Nurses on the seventh floor, I later learned, were routinely bringing me meals and that I routinely wasn’t eating them. Faces would regularly appear at my bedside and loom over me. There were always more faces. Someone would come and show me their face and the face would say hello to me, and I would think, Didn’t I look at some faces earlier today? Some faces belonged to doctors who were attempting to tell me what they had deduced about my condition. I did my best to follow what the doctors were saying, because it was obviously important. I nodded my head and said yes in a theatrical way, but, in truth, very little of what they said made sense to me. The other faces belonged to friends, and ex-girlfriends who have become my friends, and co-workers who I sometimes did and did not recognize. I didn’t understand why these people were coming to see me. As far as I was concerned, I’d be out in a few days and everything would be back to normal and these people would feel silly for having come to see me. My ability to recognize these people and to remember details and hold sustained conversations was deteriorating rapidly. Each time a new face appeared above my bed, I’d stare at its features and listen carefully to what the face was saying and puzzle over how I might know this particular person.

I received one piece of news that penetrated my perpetual twilight: my mother and father were coming. Some damn fool had phoned them and told them that I was sick. Because of this call they were heading to the airport to fly three thousand miles to a city—Vancouver—that they had never been to before. This was a terrible idea. My mother and father live in central Florida where they have retired. It was ridiculous to have them come all this way. My feeling was this: Do the damn surgery on me or whatever it is that you’re going to do and leave my parents out of it.

I’ve always been reluctant to ask my parents for anything or to burden them in any tangible way, not because I’m campaigning for “Son Of The Year” or anything, but because asking them for things, as my brother is comfortable doing, makes me beholden to them. In other words, if they should give me something then I’d be obligated to give them something in return. It probably sounds a little nuts to hear this, especially coming from a person who is the oldest son, as I am. But I’ve never wanted to have that kind of dynamic between us for some reason.

My parents are old now, though not overly so, and they are both moody, especially my sensitive father who still feels the need to act like he’s starring in his own personal version of Walking Tall even though no one has been genuinely frightened of him in decades. And they don’t have much money; they couldn’t afford the plane tickets to the west coast, which I knew. I also knew that they didn’t have passports to cross the border into Canada. I’m not sure who told me that my parents had been summoned, but whoever it was I’m sure I tried to argue with them, enlightening them with all this information. Why make them come all this way? I asked. Why give them all this worry?

Then, to my surprise, before the argument had really even gotten started, I didn’t feel like fighting about it anymore. All the fight went out of me. If my parents wanted to come, and if the doctors thought they should be here, so be it. I recognized this as the last bit of fight or orneriness that I had in me. The fight/orneriness had been waning for a week at this point, maybe longer. After this, I stopped fighting for anything, stopped getting angry or upset or feeling any emotion or having any real thoughts about what was happening to me. I was giving in and going along with whatever came my way, no matter what it was. Need me to go for an MRI? I don’t enjoy MRI’s, but fine. Need me to go for another MRI? I believe I had one already but fine. Need to completely shave the hair off one of my legs, inject me with iodine and send me downstairs to put me inside an X-ray machine that is the size of a Times Square pizza oven? Jim Dandy.

During one of the more troubling tests at the hospital my head was put inside a small box on a table. A machine was switched on and everything inside the box began spinning. I got dizzy and promptly threw up all over myself. What surprised me wasn’t that I’d thrown up—I had warned the technicians controlling the machine that the machine was making me nauseous. What surprised me was that I didn’t care in the least that I’d thrown up. I don’t know that I’ve ever thrown up before and not immediately been absolutely levelled by embarrassment. But in this moment, I felt like this: I told you people that I probably would throw up but all you did was tell me to relax and that the test was almost over and to lie still and that I was doing great and blah, blah, blah. Now, would someone please mop this wretched stuff off my face and chest for me? Because, let’s face it, this is really your fault.

I woke up after the throwing-up episode to find my mother and father’s faces looming over me like two planets I hadn’t seen in a long time. My mother’s face, wide and Polish and expansive and beautiful; my father’s face, small, handsome and Welsh and still topped with his signature mane of carefully brushed gray hair. It seemed like it had taken minutes for them to procure passports and to buy tickets and to fly from Florida to Vancouver. Didn’t someone tell me that they were coming only a moment ago? I thought. Now they were here with me, in the hospital room filled with the long shadows and the soft twilight.

I was in big trouble. I knew that for sure now. I began to understand, and to respect, and to be frightened by—really frightened by—how much trouble I was in in the moment that I first saw my parents’ confused and sympathetic faces hanging over me.