Daddy |
Issue 16
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The moon is only a white disc, pulsing, like the edge of a thumbnail imprinted in the sky. Daddy’s wind chimes move with the breeze, as if to whisper how far away he has suddenly become. Somewhere in another time and place, I feel as though I will see him again, and all this time that has passed will mean nothing. It will be like he was just sleeping, like I was.
He died February 17th. His tombstone would later read the 18th, since it was after midnight when the coroner arrived at our house to pronounce him dead, but he died the 17th. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone but me, though I thought I had prepared myself for it. He fell ill in late September. It was a metastatic tumor that originated years ago in his colon, but had now attached itself to his brain. By October, it had destroyed his ability to walk. He was confined to a hospital bed that we set up in his and my mother’s bedroom. He wanted to die at home. By November, half of his memories were gone. He spoke of things no one understood, of people he had never actually known. He began to hallucinate, to lie on his back and grab at the air with his hands, as if something was floating there and he was trying to catch it. He spoke of a man named Charlie with big legs, said he saw him outside the window walking through the field, or sitting in the rocking chair beside his bed. But no one else did. By December, we were told he could die at any time. The doctors could do nothing else for him. The tumor was inoperable and it had long stopped responding to chemotherapy and radiation. The cancer swam from cerebellum to cortex, eating and eating like a shark. I was a freshman in college and living in a dorm at the university I attended on the opposite side of the state. I kept telling myself that he wouldn’t die. It wasn’t even a possibility. Cancer was nothing new to my father. In the past seven years, he had undergone countless surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy and radiation to combat tumors in his colon, his pancreas, his neck. It had even showed up in his brain exactly one year prior, though that time the surgeon was able to remove it. Each time the cancer resurfaced, we experienced months of sadness and worry. But each time he got better and there was hope again. I kept telling myself that this was no different, that the cancer would go away this time like it had gone away in the past. When I came home for Christmas break, I saw how bad things really were. I spent the month home from school helping my mom take care of him. I saw how much work Dad was, how she had to lift him in bed and bathe him, shampoo his hair, put him on the bedpan, change his diapers. He had never been this sick or unresponsive. Sometimes he didn’t recognize me. My mother took a leave of absence from her job to become his full time nurse. He had become bedridden in early October and he died in February. My mother did not leave the house once until after his funeral. Not to buy groceries. Not to pick up the mail. Not to go shopping. Not even to go for a walk. I don’t know if she was scared to leave him or if she felt guilty. If he couldn’t leave, she wouldn’t either. Our family helped as much as they could. My brother ran my mother’s errands. My father’s sisters brought covered dishes of food so Mom wouldn’t have to cook. When I was home, I did the grocery shopping. I picked up mail from the post office. I bought her cigarettes, even though I hated her smoking. By then, I felt like that’s all she had left. She sat in the kitchen staring off into nothing, sucking and sucking the cigarettes until everything she felt burned out into a pile of ash. Mom didn’t want to put up a Christmas tree that year so I did it for her. It was small and sparse with gaping bald spots between the branches. Traditionally for Christmas, she and I would spend days decorating. We would drape garland around the front porch columns and along the mantle. We would tape Christmas cards sent from our friends and family around the doorframe that separated the kitchen from the living room. There would be fake snow on the coffee table and candles shaped like little fat snowmen and Santa and his elves. There were other candles on top of the piano, tall skinny ones that were red and green and gold. The tree always had the same ornaments and we hung them together onto the branches while we sang Christmas songs and baked sugar cookies that tasted horrible, but we ate them anyway. Every year it was comforting to pull out that box of ornaments and resurrect forgotten memories. There was the paper apple my brother made when he was a child, the little fat mouse wearing a Santa hat given to me by my old babysitter, the crystal snowflake that changed colors when it caught the light. But my favorite was a little blue stocking. I had made it out of clay in my third grade art class and couldn’t wait for my parents to see it. When Dad picked me up from school that day, I unzipped my backpack to show him, but it fell onto the ground and the tip of the stocking broke off. I stood there crying and wiping my eyes on my sweater as he gathered up the pieces. He glued them back together when we got home. It didn’t look as nice as it originally had, but it held together, and it holds still. That’s the only ornament I put on our tree the year he was dying. Daddy couldn’t get out of bed to open presents on Christmas morning. When I was a little girl I would wake first, run out of my room to see the presents scattered all around, and then rally everyone else to come gather around the tree. Dad was always the last to stir, taking time to make his coffee, but we never started without him. This year we didn’t have a choice. It was just my mother and I that morning, and she had been awake long before I was, watching infomercials on television about makeup that could reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. “Merry Christmas,” I said, sleep still in my eyes. “Merry Christmas.” I didn’t ask her if she was ready to open presents. For the first time in my life I was actually dreading it, and I could tell she was too, but she stood up from her chair and sat down on the rug beside the Christmas tree. I sat across from her in my usual space. Dad’s chair was empty. The room was awkward and quiet. The oxygen machine hissed and beeped through Daddy’s open doorway at the end of the hall. I kept waiting to hear the wooden floorboards creaking and to see him walk into the room with a cup of coffee in his right hand. We didn’t get out the video camera like we normally would have. We just opened our gifts in silence, thanking each other when appropriate. It was over very quickly. By the time we finished, neither of us could remember anything the other person had bought for them. We sat there for a moment among the discarded wrapping paper and empty cardboard boxes, our minds someplace else. Later that day, after my brother had opened gifts with his wife and daughter, they came to our house. We took all of the gifts we had for Dad into his bedroom to show him. He couldn’t open them on his own so my mother did it for him. She made a fuss over each one. “Look at these new pajamas!” she said, holding them up in the air so he could see. It was the same way she pointed out presents to my niece at her first birthday party. After the second present, Dad didn’t even look at her anymore. He just stared out the window and everyone cried a little bit without acknowledging it. We were all thinking the same thing—that he would never be able to use any of the presents we had bought for him, but I kept praying that things would turn around. Maybe he would wake up in the morning and be able to walk again. Maybe he would smile or call out our names when we walked in the room. Maybe he could be Daddy again, and not the man lying in bed who sometimes knew us and sometimes did not. Classes started up again at my university on January 14th. I drove back to school the day before to settle into my dorm, leaving Mom at home alone to care for Dad. My roommate had decided not to return to school that semester, so I had the room all to myself. I thought I would like the privacy. I had plenty of space to store all my things. But once my clothes were hung in the closet and there was nothing else to do, the loneliness set in, along with the regret. I lay in bed staring at the concrete walls thinking of Daddy. It was hard sleeping that night and even harder to wake up and get ready the next morning. I only had two classes that day, but I didn’t pay attention in either of them. I went back to the dorm and lay awake all night. I thought about my mother taking care of Dad on her own again, struggling to lift him, sitting in the kitchen smoking cigarettes. But more than that, I thought about that blank look in his eyes, the way he couldn’t carry a conversation, the way he couldn’t speak at all. Early that next morning, instead of going to class, I packed everything I could fit into my car and sat down on the front steps of my building. The sun hadn’t been up long and the sky was gray and cold. Nothing moved. It was as if I was the only person awake in the world. I got into my car, started the engine, and drove home for good without calling to ask Mom if it was okay. It was the first grown-up decision I ever had to make, but I didn’t hesitate. I enrolled in our hometown community college on January 17th. Daddy died exactly one month later. I hated taking classes at the community college because most of the people I’d just graduated from high school with the previous summer were enrolled there. When I was at the university, I felt like I was far away from home and doing something admirable, making something of myself, surviving on my own. But sitting in class next to the same old faces and same old names, looking out the window at the same sad stretch of lonely highway I had lived along my entire life made me wonder if coming home was the right decision after all. As I drove home from class snow was beginning to fall. Thin and light as powder, it dusted the tops of the mountains and limbs of the trees. My mother was sitting in the living room smoking a cigarette and watching soap operas. She asked me about class. I asked her about Daddy. Before she could answer, he groaned from the other room, calling out for her. She didn’t move. “He’s been asking me to pray with him all day,” she said. “About what?” I asked, dropping my purse onto the couch and taking off my coat. She didn’t answer for a moment, like the words were stuck in her throat. I realized she was trying not to cry. “For it to be over.” She exhaled and wiped her eyes. I wanted to ask her what—for what to be over—and then I realized. I wanted Mom to stop talking. I wanted to run. Like that time when I was ten and I found my kitten dead in the garage, or the time I was fifteen and my first boyfriend broke my heart. I wanted to run away, and fall asleep someplace safe, and wake up again like nothing ever happened. Like it was all a really long and really horrible dream. But I heard Daddy calling her name again and I knew that running away would solve nothing. He was dying. He was ready to. Even though he was asking for Mom, I went to Daddy’s room to see what he needed. I walked down the hall and turned the corner. He was lying among the bed sheets, his hair matted and his eyes wild. “Hi Daddy,” I said, trying my best to appear calm. He looked like a scared animal, like the baby deer my aunt had rescued from the woods behind her house after its mother had been killed by a car. Those same wild eyes, haunting and afraid. Not my Daddy’s eyes. I sat down on the corner of the bed, taking his hand in mine. He was shaking. “How are you feeling today?” I asked, not sure if he even knew I was his daughter. He didn’t answer, but his hand stopped shaking, so I just held onto it. He laid his head against the pillow. There was a glass of water on the nightstand beside his bed and I held it against his lips for him to drink. He tilted his head back and I wiped the water from his chin. When he was finished, he reached his shaking hand out for me to hang onto. He was so helpless. I had the urge to run away again. If I ran away none of this would be real. I watched his shaking fingers dance in the air, and I grabbed onto him, remembering all the times he held my hand when I needed it. When he taught me to walk, to hold a fishing pole, to ride my bike. He had always been there for me when no one else had. He was always the one to comfort me when something had gone wrong. And I was suddenly filled with the fear that this time would be the last. I started to cry but I didn’t let him see. I needed him to hold my hand more than ever, just as much as he needed me to hold his. The next morning everything was covered in snow. I couldn’t sleep, the beeping and hissing of Daddy’s oxygen machine keeping me awake. I got up, put on my coat and boots, opened the back door, and walked outside. The sun was barely waking. A dozen elk gathered in the meadow beside our house, grunting and snorting. I watched them, mouse brown and knob-kneed, bending and shoving their noses under the blanket of snow, searching for life. One mother with a child looked over her shoulder, the breath from her nostrils spilling out into the air. That same cool air filled my lungs. I was so numb. The cold wind gave me the breath that I needed, the sharpness to make me feel. I stood on the porch until my nose started to run and my face began to hurt. I didn’t want to go inside. Behind me I heard the door open and my mother’s voice interrupted the stillness. I must have looked crazy to her, standing out in the freezing morning air, tears streaming down my face. “Get in here before you catch cold and I have to take care of you too,” she said. |
Jessica Knuth is the author of Animalia, a novel seeking publication. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in literary publications such as Pictura Journal, Phylum Press, Sky Island Journal, and The Manifest-Station, among others.
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