The pain was the chasm between our worlds, the loneliness of consciousness. I could not see the darkness that blotted his days; he could not see the light that flooded mine. To fill that gap, when I looked at this man in my life I saw as the other, I leaned into the one thing that seemed to hold us: hope.

These days, I rarely am the master of my own thoughts. Instead, I find myself dragged along. For me this became a moment to confront the grief that had piled over the past days, the past weeks, the past months, the past year.

The microphone’s snap and crackle, the glistening sweat on the musician’s foreheads, the rumble of the floorboards from the stomping feet. There, in a small fishing village on the western edge of Cape Breton, N.S., I unknowingly became part of a cèilidh.

When she hangs up, the little bit of light leaves my patient’s eyes. His cavernous room suddenly amplifies his loneliness. I inch toward him, and place my hand on his shoulder. He places his wrinkled hand over mine. His grip is strong.

In this process, there was a part of me I started to lose. This was the part that had held hope and extended trust; the part that saw clearly these individuals within the outlines of a shared humanity, not a broken one. A hole in me had been exposed, and it lacked closure and would remain unfilled, unless I, in some way, got closer to the truth.

Sitting at his usual spot in the corner is my grandfather. His eyes surface for a quick “hello” before they plunge back down into the focus in front of him. Brows furrowed, glasses perched on the tip of his nose and an arm flexed into his chin like Rodin’s The Thinker, I’ll always catch him in the middle of some thought.

Curving gently in front of a liquor store, it was barely an afterthought in my daily commute. But on this dark winter day, I'm seeing the neighbourhood in a different light.

As I crane my head to appreciate the temple's colour and grandeur, the streets begin to fade out of sight. I step through the large wooden doors and plant my bare right foot onto the cold seventh-century stone. Everything around me falls silent. I hear now only the beat of my heart.