He looked just like my mother's baby brother

He deteriorated fast. The last time I saw him before we went to the hospital, he was crossing the street. It was winter, I remember because he was wearing a maroon red sweater, and he looked just like my mother's baby brother. He looked like the mischief he brought to the family, the eyes so dark brown, they were almost black, the birthmark above his cheekbone, the cigarette smoke wafting out of his smile. We had all gone to the monastery together, to visit the monk, the one I once wrote a poem about. About his cellphone and beat-up computer, and pirated copy of Photoshop. The monk prayed for my uncle and we all got in the car and drove back to Cairo, to the nearest bus station. 

Later, my mother said he looked distracted, and nearly crossed the street a split second too soon. If he had, a bus would have swept him off his feet, and into the dusty Cairo air, and he might have died that day. 

At the hospital, it was a different man lying in that bed, with only a voice that sounded like his. Everything else had changed. His hair was almost gone, only small tufts left. He never shaved it off after he started the chemo, because he was dying so it didn't matter to him. His face looked swollen, like he was gaunt and had gained weight all at the same time. He didn't look like him anymore. 

I didn't know what to say. I kept smiling, squeezing his hand, that hand that didn't look like his hand anymore, and he kept asking me how I was doing, and I kept saying I was fine I was fine I was fine, but I wasn't and he wasn't and we kept lying to each other. We all lied that day, because it was easier than facing the truth of a hospital bed, and a family that was waiting, in the room, in the hallways, knowing what came next. 

It was like when Alice, my grandmother died. And her sons and daughters, her grandchildren, all surrounded her bed in a hospital, thousands of miles away in Virginia, and the oxygen mask covered her tiny face, that had shrunk with age, and disease, and her hair was almost gone too, but hers because she was eight-something, not because she was taking medicine that makes your hair fall out, the hurts when you take it, that seems to kill as it saves. Her eyes were closed, and my aunt, the youngest one, she kept crying, and screaming, and I can't remember the words she was saying. I just remember thinking I don't know the woman in this bed, the one they all knew so much better than me. 

And in that hospital room filled with family, she quietly went, once the oldest still living, and her family mourned her with all the noise and fury of Cairo, in the middle of American suburbia, in a stark, white, hospital room, with buzzing machines and disinfected curtains. 

And here he lay, in a hospital bed in Cairo, the walls and lights yellow, like the city. Here he lay, his family around him, so much quieter, so much softer, because his eyes were still open, and he could hear and smile, a semblance of a smile, a ghost of that smile with the cigarette smoke and crooked teeth. Here he lay, the youngest in the family, the baby, the mischievous one, the first to die. 

I don't remember seeing his birthmark, that day, in the hospital. It was like it had been swallowed into his face, into the medicine dripping through the IV, and into his arm. It was like the cancer had taken away the blackness of his eyes, the birthmark, and the cheekbone it sat above. It was all gone. 

One week later, so was he.