Until a few months ago I’d never met a long-term orphan. My boys spent a few months as orphans in Latin America before we adopted them, but they were too young to know lasting rejection.

Then I met a former marine in his late 60s. As a ward of the state, he’d been sexually abused on a state farm “at the point of a knife.” He had two kinds of cancer from a lifetime of smoking, and he’d been at the Togus VA Medical Center hospice for nearly five months. Too much alcohol played a part as well, he admitted.

We got to talking about how much he missed living on Matinicus Island, where he’d been the stern man on a lobster boat. Hoping to go home, he openly pondered the “middle ground,” a point where he said the body’s not quite ready to let go as the mind blurs. I watched him run his hand along a wet cheek and wondered if he imagined how the end stage would have turned out had a sibling or two or a son or daughter been around to sit bedside.

Oddly enough, the head hospice nurse told me she’d never heard of a “middle ground.” Either way, he said his doctor told him before my third visit that he had two to five years, and he could spend them on the island. A short-term future beckoned and he couldn’t stop grinning. I shook his big, gnarly hand, and he said, “Salt air, man.”

Then on a recent visit, he told me they were transferring him to a Boston hospital for surgery. Not true. On an even later visit, a nurse made it clear that he sustains himself through fantasies. Whatever works, I suppose. It looks like he’ll draw his last breath at Togus.

Then there was the Army combat engineer with advanced prostate cancer playing cribbage against a former naval officer who, like me, volunteers at hospice. The grizzled old vet kept a sharp eye on his opponent, and told me, “Y’know, if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t winnin’.”

The navy guy and I made stale jokes about doing what our wives tell us to do, and the old guy paused, put a long index finger in the air, and rasped, in measured, stentorian tones, “They tell the truth.” I asked him how many times he’d been married. He held up three fingers.

A few weeks later, I pushed his wheelchair to the Togus store. He knew exactly where to find a three-pack of multi-fruit lifesavers. At the counter, he struggled with an ancient billfold, paying for the candy and, on impulse, a bunch of mint patties. Passing the hospice nurse station on the way back he expertly tossed half of them into a candy bowl to be enjoyed by one and all.

I also sat with an Air Force vet who was “actively dying,” an odd clinical phrase if there ever was one. He couldn’t speak, but he could hear, said one of the marvelous nurses as she stroked his arm and told him he was safe and where he needed to be. I’ve started to follow that example, as I could be one of the last voices those crossing over hear.

A former Army Special Forces sergeant major couldn’t talk thanks to a stroke, but he kept pointing at a cabinet under the TV. It took me a while to figure out that he wanted a baseball-type hat, black and gold like the Army’s colors. I put it on his chest and he held it up and smiled his thanks. Since then, a series of mini-strokes have largely replaced the smiles with a confused-looking grimace. Last I saw him, he’d stopped eating, and friends and family had gathered to wait for the end.

Then there was the Marine sergeant major, an old artilleryman like me. That’s about as high as you can go in the enlisted ranks, and I was the lowest officer ranking — lieutenant. He was a 27-year Marine, and I was a short-term citizen soldier.

We chatted about Vietnam as his wife looked on with a smile. Later, we sat down in two separate but nearby groups in the central area that looked like a lounge at a mid-scale hotel. He nodded at me and said “Sir,” and I nodded and said, “Sergeant Major.”

I went back a week later and his room was empty, neatly laid out for the next veteran. Woven into the bedspread was an image of the Stars and Stripes.

Dave Griffiths of Mechanic Falls is a retired journalist who served in Vietnam.

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