blueperiod.: the last thing he said to me

When I was seventeen years old I killed my father without a second thought. The little girl I was babysitting asked me where my father was, and rather than go into the whole story about how my parents were separated, and in the past five years I had only seen my father a handful of times, I said, "He's dead."

At the time it was easier to just be done with him; no possibility of complicated intrusions. Now, I'd happily embrace such complexities if it were possible to resuscitate him with an off-hand comment. "Oh, my father? He lives in Florida; fishes all day, dances all night."

The truth was that he lived four hundred miles away and thought of me probably as often as I thought of him. I spent my adolescence learning how to live without him; erasing him from my life. I forgot about the way light danced in his eyes when he smiled. I forgot about how he liked to sing old songs like, “Chances Are,” and “Blue Moon.” I forgot about how when he fried onions and green peppers, the smell reached into every corner of the house and made me feel safe and loved. I forgot all of these things until one day, years later, my mother called to say, “Your father is in the hospital. He has cancer.”

I was twenty then, and in the middle of the worst summer of my life. I was working two jobs and still broke. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere without a car. I was struggling to finish coursework that was months overdue. And to top it all off, I was recovering from a mess I’d made with this guy, who, in hindsight, was so much like my father that it scares me now to think about it.

I felt like I’d already died a little bit that summer, but for some reason I dropped everything—at a time when I was desperately trying to hold on— and flew to the side of a dying man; a man I’d already killed in my memory. After all that time it was the threat of losing him for good that reminded me he was still there. If my mother had said, “Your father is frying onions and peppers. He misses you,” would I have gone?

What will he think of me? I wondered on my way to the hospital. I hope he doesn’t comment on the weight I gained in college. Will he even notice? Will he tell me how proud he is of me? Please don’t let him see what I’ve been through this summer. Will he even notice? It didn’t occur to me to prepare myself for what I might see. I never considered the visibility of his illness; never considered that he might have changed.

He was surprisingly small, and I somehow matched his size, even threatened to surpass it. My body automatically pulled in on itself, shrinking from its newfound stature. I watched him puff himself up to fill in the space I had created. Then, exhausted by his posturing, he relaxed into the bed, propped up by pillows and that glimpse of his reflection in my eyes.

The television blared in that comforting way that it does in hospital rooms. Its presence meant to create a false sense of normalcy. Just another sunny afternoon with a rerun of “Hee-Haw” playing in the background. My mother, my sisters and I obliged by periodically fixing our gaze on it, as we sat and stood around his bed. I welcomed the distraction from the IV poles, the beeping of machines, the ill-fitting, unattractive bedclothes; anything to keep my mind off of what was in front of me? Or was it the past I avoided? Of course, I couldn’t even think about the future.

He couldn’t speak because of the hole in his neck. He scratched out words on one of those magnetic doodling boards in purposeful, child-like strokes befitting the toy. I watched him as he wrote. Lips pursed, brow furrowed, he had the look of someone either deep in concentration or working through pain. He always looked like that when he wrote; the emotional intent visible on his face. A face that changed quickly and without warning.

His whole body, his mood, was like that—violently mutable. Even as the cancer cells multiplied with an aggression that decimated his body, he lunged at my mother from across the bed. She flew backwards in her chair, forcing herself against and up the wall, in a familiar attempt to escape whatever was about to happen. She had a piece of hard candy in her hand and a look of terror on her face.

We all froze, even the nurse who’d come to check his vitals. My father’s entire body, the thin frame of a young man shrouded in the wrinkles of an old one, pointed forward in a straight line. His arm stretched to its limit, reached towards my mother, fingers poised to grab but managing only a handful of air. For the briefest of moments I was back in some other place that neither looked nor smelled like dying, but felt like it all the same. And so time paused allowing me to catch up.

“He’s just crazy for a piece a hard candy,” said the nurse, a middle-aged white woman with a strong southern drawl. I liked the way she meandered through the “ar” in hard. “Begs for it more than he does a cigarette.”

She fiddled with the IV bags, grinning at my father, who had fallen back against his pillows, the smile on his face deepening with each labored breath. I imagined the trouble he must have caused daily, despite his weakness, his inability to go off on angry tirades or to do his best Johnny Mathis impersonation.

The nurse said his feet could use some attention and handed my sister a small bottle of lotion. She removed his socks, and I was hit head-on with the truth. He is dying, I thought. His feet are already dead.

One of my strongest memories from childhood is watching my father’s foot-care rituals. He babied his feet more than his children. They served him every day as he stood for hours in the little grocery, butchering meat, sorting vegetables, stocking shelves, working the register, and he repaid them with a tender attentiveness that made me ache.

And I ached as my sister revealed shriveled, twisted bones thinly covered by yellowed skin. Streams and branches of blue and white were everywhere, leading nowhere. The nails, like brittle talons grayed by time and neglect. The soles were a desert landscape, parched and cracked by infinitesimal fissures of thirst.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, I told myself. I sat beside him, small in my chair, matching his silence and waiting, as I’d done so many times before. I waited for his stories about his childhood, his misspent youth. I waited for his musings on life and the universe. I waited to hear his observations of the people in his life, which, though colored by his own fears and insecurities, were always astute. I waited for him to tell me how much he had missed me, and to remind me of how much I would miss him.

He pushed himself up and turned to face me. He tried to speak, to manipulate the hole in his throat in order to get the words out. There was a gurgled sound, like a whisper underwater. His eyes searched mine for understanding. I shook my head. He reached for the doodling board and scratched the letters out with visible deliberateness.

“DADDY’S HOME,” he wrote.

I wanted to believe him; wanted desperately for his words to be true, and that desperation surprised me. It did a number on me, really—more than seeing him so changed, or even being pulled back to a life I’d left behind. Two words that pulled me back just as he was on his way out.