Category : Stories

Sub Category : Drama

Morning passed quickly, and snow was beginning to accumulate for the first time in a few days. It seemed to be so unnaturally cold outside that it could not snow. The driveway of the small, plain trailer home had been filling up car by car over the course of the morning. Family members and close family friends were gathered in the tiny living room, recovering their body heat and talking solemnly. The cramped space they occupied provided the perfect scene; with it's low ceiling, artificial light, and sound muffling walls that allowed no vibration of word or song or laughter to reverberate. Instead falling dead in the stifling air. Dead, and flat, and empty. It was was fitting.
This wasn't a joyous occasion. No lighthearted get-together, no, this was a farewell meeting. For through the kitchen, at the other end of the confined, little hallway that you have to duck to walk into, two steps brought you down into what they called the living room. There lied the patriarch of the family. He lay in a motorized hospital bed, placed impromptu in the middle of the room. Four walls and soft music his only company for the moment, and the moments ticked away. 
The conversation in the living room turns. I sat still and did not speak. Occasionally a joke or story was told that got a laugh, if somewhat forced. It seemed only laughter concealing tears, but I couldn't help but think of how the one person excluded from the laugh must have felt. Surely he could hear. 
My guilt overtook me and I couldn't sit with them anymore. I took some coffee, and left to the family room. I sat on the futon beside the hospital bed, where I had been sleeping next to my father for the seemingly endless days since his recovery was deemed impossible. He was awake for a moment, then flitted in and out of sleep, gradually surrendering. Even when he was awake he didn't speak. In fact, he hadn't spoken a word in days. He had tried, sure, but each failure and weak, garbled request or answer only served to frustrate all involved. My broken heart ached for that poor, pitiful man in that bed. He was not the same powerful presence he had been in my childhood. Not even the same old man he had been just a few months before. He was tasting defeat. Withered, and pathetic, his fight was drawing to it's inevitable end. 
The rest of the family filtered in soon after me.  My uncle, his wife, my brother and sister, and some other faces I didn't care much about.  Most of my family were little more than strangers to me.  My sister and brother had long loved away and seldom visited.  The whole family (what was left of it at least) seldom visited.  It was my father, my mother, and myself.  
My mother.  She held her composure.  Veiled the turbulence roiling underneath.  She made the coffee, took the coats and said the pleasantries and seemed to be doing just fine.  We were all concealing (or not) sorrow.  But if these things were quantifiable my mother's would have undoubtedly been most.  In hindsight's clarity, I admire her strength that day.
Before too long there was a line at my father's bedside.  Everyone stood awkwardly, in single file.  They waited their turn to hold his hand.  Say their "I love you"s or whatever sentiments they felt the need to share.  Everyone was uncomfortable.  I knew the feeling well and could see it easily.  I was fifteen years old, and had already lost count of the funerals I'd attended.  I knew the feeling.  But in this context it seemed strange to me.  This wanted different.  This was my father.  I wanted to be beside him at the end.  This time I couldn't understand how anyone could not be feeling the exact same way I felt myself.  It almost made me angry.  But I but my tongue, figuratively.  Literally, I was clenching my teeth.  Clenching my teeth and breathing through flared nostrils to not allow the steadily growing lump in my throat to turn into tears.  So I sat, a silent observer to the worst day of my life.  So far.
It seemed no one was enjoying the tension in the family room, because without much more than that quick procession of goodbyes everyone made their way back to the living room.  I couldn't bring myself to leave.  I stayed.  I'm glad I stayed.  
My father was never one for deep or philosophical talks.  In fact, I don't ever remember having a talk like that with him.  Myself, I have never been one to talk at all.  Much to a fault, and many times to my detriment, my feelings and my thoughts stay right where they are; tucked away behind an uncaring front.  I wish now that I could go back to that room and that I could for once, just for a minute, have the courage to say what needed to be said.
He ran out of moments while I was still alone with him.  I somehow sensed that it was happening.  He had been waiting, now it was time.  I sat at his right side and sat close enough to hold his hand.  A calloused hand that I once thought was the stongest hand in the world.  Now it was smaller and weaker, cold and bony and it didn't seem to work.  So I just held his right hand in my hands.  His right hand man.  His right hand man that just months ago had failed him irreparably, now robbed of the chance for redemption.  Pardoned of consequences, freed forever from the man.  But shackled forever to the guilt, and the shame.  
"Dad?"
As the first shakey word that I had spoken all day fell out of my mouth I lost my hold on the lump in the throat and all the tears waiting just behind my eyes fell out with it.  Not bawling, blubbering tears of grief, I don't think I was even able to comprehend the finality of the moment that I was living.  Only the bitter, hot tears.  The ones that you make when your just so desperately overloaded that the pain you're feeling liquefies, and spills out of your eyes like water over a damn.  I wasn't crying.  I was exploding.  
"Dad?"
I cleared my throat and repeated myself, taking a lot of effort to make my voice work.  
"Please don't go."
It was the only thing I said to him.  The stupidest thing I could have said.  Impossible as a request.  Selfish as a feeling.  There were myriad other things I could have said, if one sentence was to be our closure.  Things that should have been said even long before, that I had one final chance to say.  Instead, with my last opportunity to speak to him, I left him with guilt.  
He tried to reply.  He opened his mouth as words were perched on the top of his tongue waiting to leap.  But he couldn't speak.  He found the strength in his hand to close it weakly around mine.  His blue eyes looked straight into mine and seemed to scream out with a desperate urgency I had never seen before.  The only tear I had ever seen the man cry escaped the corner of his eye, and rolled down the side of his face to be lost in his hair.  His grip on my hand tightened, and he drew in what would be his last breath of life.  He let it out, sounding almost like a sigh of relief, until the rest of the air in his lungs was forced out to empty behind it with a sound that I will never forget.  The eyes that were seconds ago alive and urgent, darkened, and closed.  The hand that raised me, fed me, and tucked me into bed, hit me, held me down and pointed the way, the hand that had just clung so desperately to mine, went limp.
I can't describe how I felt.  "Like I was being crushed flat by weight of the entire universe" is all that comes to mind.  I took two steps up, walked on autopilot down the hall and through the kitchen.  I grabbed my coat and mindlessly told the others he was gone as I zipped it up, and kept walking right out the front door.  I walked and walked and walked through that bitter cold, but I didn't feel any of it.  I wanted to scream.  I was furious with myself and furious with him too.  For not telling me some impregnable truth or some grand sentiment or something to live by, or just anything at all.  Some last words. 
Now after many years have gone by, I have come to the realization that that wasn't necessary.  He did tell me something after all.  Everything that needed to be said, simply went unspoken, in the warmth between his mighty hand and mine, and in the reflection of that tear.  The only tear he ever cried.