the house by the sea pt. 6: dead father

His father had died several weeks before the problem. He had been there when it happened and had watched when he stopped breathing. His last rattled breaths had sounded like an insult, the body reduced to nothing. His father’s eyes stared at him with the fear not of death but of loneliness. He didn’t recognise him. Somehow even fixed his eyes looked bright and young and that seemed the saddest thing. He sat with the body for an hour in the hospital room. There was no sun but the venetian blinds cast striped shadows over the white blanket that shrouded his father. He didn’t speak or plead or pray, and the one time he rested his own hand on top of his father’s fingers the coldness of the skin had made him recoil. Life was replaced so quickly it was almost unbelievable. The room felt stifling, as though death had engulfed everything around it, and the soundlessness was immense and terrifying, and he looked a final time at his father, who was so still in the bed that he was like a faint imprint left behind, and he went to the nurse’s station and told them he was finished and thanked them for all they had done, and their condolences were efficient as they had to be. He met Linda later that day and told her everything that had happened and she stroked his head in her lap. He felt most sad, he had said, about the fact that he hadn’t felt that sad. That he had always imagined how it would feel to be that close to death and it would be humbling or somehow ennobling but it was instead simply cold and almost tedious. She said she understood. She said it was the certainty, the inevitability that made it so. Death is only another thing happening. He told her that while he had never been religious he couldn’t help finding a deep spiritual importance in the death of his father, as if it left him freer than he’d ever been, to make his own life, to structure his own thoughts and devise his own significances, that it was like being liberated from the oppressive familial regime that had mutely haunted him all through life. She said he gave death far more value than it deserved and called him an idealist in the way that most people would call someone a bastard. Death, she said, is the most terminal normality. When he fucked Linda later that night he pictured his father, cold and dead beneath the stiff white hospital sheet, his body sagging beneath the weight of its own lifelessness, and as he came soon after he noticed he was crying, a fact they both chose not to mention while they waited for the alarm to go off. The problem stirred only in nightmares, in fiction, in metaphor, in the inactive depths of our ancient genes, but in weeks it would reign, in weeks life would fall.