Our lives are frequently marked by the unexpected.
Coming home on a Saturday night, I didn't know that within half an hour I'd be on dark desert roads headed to Las Vegas.
My friend hadn't known until that afternoon that his father was lying in a Nevada hospital bed, body wracked with cancer.
It must've been sometime around 2 a.m. when we got there. The halls of the ICU were hushed, dimly lit and smelling faintly of the chemical smell all hospitals have. Joseph went in to spend some time at his father's bedside while we waited down the hall. At one point, he text-messaged me, asking me to take a photo.
It's one thing to shoot these kinds of images for a news story, when there's a certain divide between you and the story. It's another when it's of a close friend, sitting there watching a machine keep his father alive.
And frankly, as powerful as I find this image, I wouldn't have posted it unless Joseph had asked me to, after his father passed this week.
