The drip of an IV and the beep of a heart monitor greeted me when I followed her into the dim light of the room and she presented me with an elderly man crumpled into an upright bed and hooked up to about five different machines.

It was George. His eyes fluttered when I walked up to the foot of the bed to confirm his identity.

“Tomb…stone,” the words dribbled out of his mouth pathetically like drool.

I jumped when a soft hand upon my shoulder interrupted my confused staring.

I whipped my gaze around to see Gaby standing next to me.

“Grandpa has been talking about you all day. You were the last person he needed to talk to. He said you’ve really been helping him say goodbye to the old ghosts rattling in his head the past few months,” Gabby explained with her eyes locked onto George.

“Grandpa?”

A tired wave of the hand from George distracted me from Gabey. The frail hand waved me in his direction.

“Come here, Tomb…stone.”

I winced. My mind raced. What the fuck was all of this? But yet, I followed George’s hand to his bedside.

“Mark,” I was immediately taken aback when George used my real name.

“Ye-e-e-e-e-s,” I answered back equal parts sheepish and soft.

“I want to thank you, and tell you something,” George said with a whisper despite putting every ounce of his energy into speaking up. “Come closer.”

I craned my neck down to George’s dried lips, feeling them scratch upon the soft skin just below my ear lobe.

“The ghosts have went away,” he muttered. “They are at bay. I think, because I found you.”

I nodded furiously in agreement eve though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was agreeing to.

“I never wanted to kill anyone. I never wanted to neglect anyone. I never wanted to abandon anyone, forget anyone, but I was a victim of my own circumstance. Us men are not perfect. We’re wired in the wrong way and then the electricians come in all the time and rewire us the wrong way. At least for this world. I think they forgave me though.”

“Who?”

“The soldier. Your grandma. Your mom. The younger man I was. They’ve left me alone since I have been seeing you. I think I just needed to say sorry to someone, flesh and blood. So again, I’m sorry. I should have been your grandpa. Not some creep in a hospital bed calling you a tombstone. Just make sure to visit mine, will ya?”

I’m not going to lie and say I was crying, but I the strings of my heart were pulled tight, yanking the air from my lungs and quivering the contents of my stomach. The man may have been flawed, Gabby would later confirm his neglect drove my grandmother to suicide and he soon after abandoned my mom for the sunny skies of Florida and Gabby’s mother, but I held little contempt.

Gabby let me know he requested to be sent to the retirement in my hometown in hopes of tracking down either me or my mother only to discover cancer had already buried my mom and I had long fled for the dead dreams of Hollywood. It had been a simple twist of fate that I delivered those pizzas to him that day.

It turned out George was nearly nearing 95 years old, beaten, tired, fighting about five serious, lingering illnesses, but just couldn’t seem to find a way to die. It wasn’t until I started to come around that he started to strangely, thankfully slip away.

And I personally watched those last few moments slip away. Watched that flickering glimmer of life melt away from his gaze until he was just a sack of blood and bones coldly cased in skin in a darkened hospital room.

Life went back to its normal rhythm of slightly-depressing boredom once Gabby dropped me back off at my apartment and I failed to sleep the rest of the night, instead looking up every piece of info I could try to find about George Heatherton from Melbourne, Florida. Unfortunately the Internet fails to properly document those of the older generation. I found nothing.

I didn’t bother emailing the email address Gabby slipped me before she dropped me off. I didn’t bother trying to find out information about the funeral. I didn’t bother taking the thing one step further. I was content.

The entire ordeal was about as out of my head as possible when there was a knock on my door in the middle of a Saturday night after a 12-hour shift at Frontier. The heaviest of pounding upon the frail door of my apartment shook me from the comfort of a deep sleep.