When I arrived home from watching the latest installment in the Bond franchise, I couldn’t keep quiet about it. My wife was surprised, perhaps mortified, being that I had never shown a particular interest in our nation’s favourite spy ever before.

If anything, I had done nothing but complain about Bond previously. The way he treats women. His obsession with fast cars, technology, and gadgets. Or even, God forbid, the othering of non-British natives as people to be feared and flung out of helicopters. All wearisome tropes that had begun to grate on me long before No Time to Die hit the screen.

The only reason I went to see the movie was because I had been so deprived of cinematic experience, so starved of Hollywood bombast and melodrama during the pandemic that there was literally nothing else that would hit the spot like a James Bond movie. And even then, it affected me more than I ever could have imagined. The pathos I felt watching No Time to Die was unlike anything I’ve experienced from cinema before. I’m aware that seems like a ridiculous statement, but it’s true. And my wife was right to question it—why?

No Time to Die is about time. Yes, there are beautiful women. Yes, there is camp comedy. Yes, there are plenty of stunts—but the heart of the film is about time, specifically time running out. It’s a theme that’s set up within minutes of the picture’s opening, when Bond (loved up and retired) turns to amour Madeleine Swann and declares, “We have all the time in the world.” It’s such a beautiful and poignant remark that the screenwriter in me immediately balked at the whiff of deathly irony in it, an impending doom that would only be punctuated by a third act callback to the exact opposite sentiment. Emptying hourglasses during the movie’s opening titles only served to compound the notion of time running out and there never being enough time. This was a familiar feeling to me, because my father was dying whilst I was watching it.

Cardiac Amyloidosis was his illness, an ultra-rare disease that thickens the heart muscle, hindering its ability to pump properly, until it eventually gets so bulky and belaboured that it can no longer pump at all. At the time of Dad’s diagnosis, we were told that out of a million people, it only affects eight. And because it is so rare, there is no known cure. A heart transplant, maybe—but not for a man in his late sixties. Kenneth John Brouard first caught light of the illness in 2017 and was given between four and seven years to live. A death sentence, essentially. And there I was in a cinema in Vancouver in 2021, four years in, some five thousand miles away from home, while his time was running out.

Dad had been given the dreaded kiss of death, the same black spot given to Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of the Caribbean, or the literal kiss given to Fredo in The Godfather: Part II. In No Time to Die, Bond is given it, too. He’s marked for death as soon as the film starts. From the initial assassination attempt outside Vespa’s grave to the near-drowning experience with Felix Leiter and the targeted poisoning attempt from Blofeld, Bond’s death is artfully foreshadowed throughout, serving to heighten the anxiety and eventual catharsis felt during the film’s masterful final act.

“If you get it on you, how do you get it off?” Bond asks of Heracles, the DNA-targeted poison that will finally take him away from his loved ones forever. “You can’t. It’s permanent. It’s eternal,” Q replies flatly. The same response invariably given by doctors when my dad questioned his prognosis. “Well, that’s not going to work,” Bond says.

In the twelve or so hours before his death, Dad repeatedly asked me why his body was failing him. Whether there was anything they could do about it. There wasn’t anything anyone could do. It was permanent. It was eternal.

When you know someone close to you is dying, the smallest event related to their health can feel like drowning in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. For Dad, a man limited to just over a litre of liquid a day on account of his body otherwise retaining fluid and putting deadly stress on his other organs, opting whether to have a glass of water or not was quite literally a life and death situation. And in the run up to his passing, he was forever in and out of hospital, sometimes intensive care, for just that. Like Bond, he managed to cheat death a few times, but also like Bond, death finally managed to cheat him.

In the end, it’s a combination of Heracles, multiple gunshot wounds, a few hand grenades, and a full missile strike from the Royal Navy that ends James Bond’s life. My Dad’s own passing wasn’t anywhere near as grandiose but was just as earth shattering. The death certificate claims cardiac amyloidosis, kidney failure and the onset of sepsis finally stopped his heart on November 18, 2021.

“We just need more time” Madeleine pleads with Bond through a handheld radio at the end of the film. “If only we had more time.” “You have all the time in the world,” he responds, while patiently awaiting his impending doom.

“We had some good times,” Mum said to Dad during his own final act. “Yes, but I wanted some more,” he replied.

Here was a man just coming to grips with family life. A man who, with death so nearby, had only just started to embrace his emotions and the softer side of his masculinity. A man who, being of a certain generation, was sometimes problematic. A man who drove fast cars, travelled the world, and dressed well. A man who had only just told his son that he loved him.

In many ways it felt like I was only just starting to get to know him—it was No Time to Die.

Nick Brouard is an award-winning copywriter moonlighting as a fiction writer. He currently lives and (sometimes) works in Vancouver, BC.