The Visitor (3)

My Father

I remember my father’s nurses being fantastic. There were four of them and they wrapped him heavily in clothes and blankets- one of which my mother had sewn for him as a teenager. His face was extremely frail but his soul had clearly not deserted him deep within those interwoven crème cottons. His eyes screamed the gratitude his lips couldn’t match and we all knew he was ready. The priest bid his blessing and commented how my father would be forever remembered as a true gentleman before he left. We were brought up into the Catholic faith and ironically this was the first time since I had taken my confirmation that I felt at all close to God. It had been six years since I had last prayed.

I remember feeling ever so cold by that beaten old bedroom door as I watched the slow decay of my life’s lion. He had been a fortress and a true boxer to pain. The nurses said that this time nothing could be done, only that he be made to feel as ‘comfortable as possible.’ It was from that wintry doorway that I asked those lily-white ladies to leave so that I may bid farewell. As they brushed past me and out of the room, I remember waiting for some act of miraculous creation. There was nothing of the sort.

I wasn’t ready. I feared earth’s rotation was too fast for me. I felt there was significance to how the curtains strained the dimming light upon those starved eyes. Then he breathed my name. I will never forget the sound. It was his every effort. I gave him my hand so I could feel his warmth beneath that blue and mountainous veined skin. I never experienced anything quite like how he had said my name. As he squeezed my hand, I made a minute’s promise that I wouldn’t weep. I didn’t want his last image of me to be a crying fool’s face so I smiled back a fool’s smile.

He tightened his grip of me to let me know he was still there, that I shouldn’t be afraid. It was so hard to restrain the tears but I had made myself a promise and would stay true to my word. I wanted to tell him not to be afraid but deep down I knew he wasn’t. Words escaped me when I could have told of love for him. In those spare seconds, though, I just smiled and shared his loving gaze. Once he said it the way he did, my name would never be the same again. In that name, he told me to take care of myself. He hoped I would remain as happy as I had been growing up, and that now, I was to be the lion. He told me that I should fear nothing in life and not let the cancer destroy us both.

In my smile he passed. Those beautiful hazel eyes shone in mine for that last bloodless breath. The room fell silent, dark and to peace all in one instant.

When my mother entered a moment later, the light resumed and my heart began to beat again. I watched her silent response to our silence. She didn’t panic in her suspicions but lowered her ear to his mouth. She rested there as a tear stroked down her nose and found its way to the bridge in his lips. As she covered her dead husband with the blanket she made him when they first met, she explained to me in melancholy: “Life is hard and unjust. Love, my child, is unfair but truly divine.”