Don't Forget to Write

It comes in threes

Back at the apartment, I plugged my phone in and saw that I had several missed calls from my mom and my sister. I returned my mother's call.

"Peter," she said.

"You called?"

"You need to come home." There was a crack in her voice. She sounded weak.

"What's wrong?"

"Dad's in the hospital."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. He was at work. He was complaining about a pain in his head and then he blacked out. We just got here, we're in the waiting room."

"Okay, I'll catch a train. My phone is going to die soon, but I'll be there in a couple hours." I tore the drawer in my room apart to find that rusted, murky old watch that he had given me on my birthday. I hadn't worn it yet. I strapped it on, tied my shoes, told Bruno I had to go, and hopped the downtown A train to Penn Station, Then the first NJ Transit line back to Morristown. My phone had been dead since I got on the subway, I could only imagine what was going on in the hospital. I fidgeted with the watch, adjusting the date and time, and wrung my hands and tapped my feet. Maybe it was over exhaustion? Or dehydration? Or another diabetic episode?

Finally, the train stopped. The hospital was a little less than a mile away so I walked. The drizzle from earlier had become frozen as flurries of snow were coming down fast and sticking to the ground around. A truck was spreading salt in the hospital parking lot as I walked in.

I didn't see my family in the waiting room, so I went to the desk and told the lady my last name and that I was looking for my father. After a few minutes of waiting, a nurse came over.

"Peter?" the nurse asked.

"Yes."

"Come with me." I followed her. "So, you commuted from New York?"

I nodded. She looked sideways at me and kept walking. She was young, maybe in her mid-twenties, and she was cute, too. But she looked stressed. The emotion around her eyes was weathered and old. The anxiety and darkness of working in a hospital was already getting to her. She stopped at a door and turned around and looked at me.

"Yes?" I asked.

"I'm afraid I have bad news before you go in there. Your father suffered a brain aneurism. There wasn't much we could do by the time he arrived, and though we did everything possible to bring him back, he, well... he passed." She looked at me, waiting for a response. I said nothing, I just looked back. She was suddenly very far away, and the walls around me were closing in around me. "I'm sorry for your loss. Your family is in here," she opened the door. Inside, my mother and sister were sitting in chairs, holding each other as they cried. My uncle was standing a few feet away from them. They all looked at me when I walked in. I looked at the bed.

There he was.

There was my dad.

Except, it wasn't my dad. It was the body my dad used to be in. It was so still that it didn't even look real, it looked like a wax figure. I could tell the body was cold. We can't sense body heat from the living, but somehow the dead can make a whole room cold.

"They were waiting for you, we are going to move him soon," the nurse said. "I'll give you a moment to say your goodbyes." She left the room and closed the door.

My uncle walked over and stood next to my father's head and looked down on his younger brother. He didn't say anything. He kept a firm gaze and a stiff lip, traces of all of the things left unsaid marked on the heavy wrinkles on his forehead. He rested a hand on my dad's stiff shoulder, bowed his head, then turned to leave the room. He patted my shoulder on his way out, and wiped a single tear from his cheek.

My sister walked up and shakily kissed his forehead and said something, I wasn't sure what. It was incoherent through the crying. When she left my mother walked over and whispered in his ear, too low for me to hear. It could have been a prayer or a final message. She kissed his cheek and also walked out, putting a hand on my arm as she left.

I walked over next to him. Even over his dead body, a nonliving, non-thinking, body, I couldn't shake the awkward pressure I felt whenever we were alone in a room. I felt like I needed to say something special, or figure out the magic thing that might bring him back to life. I had to do something. If I didn't then I had failed him. But those were misguided fantasies. Touching eulogies were not given in hospital rooms. Magic words and prayers don't bring people back. Not even science of the highest caliber could do that. Despite knowing this, I felt I let him down. Again, just like always. I could have been here before he passed. I could have called him more when he was alive. I could have set our differences aside and forgotten about the events of my childhood and just respected him as another man. But I didn't. We hardly ever spoke, we hardly had any strong memories together. In this moment couldn't remember him smiling, laughing, or yelling. I couldn't think of anything except for the fact that this was his dead body. The room seemed to be breathing, as the walls sucked in and blew out all around me and the floor rocked as if it was a ship on rocky seas, but above all of these physical sensations, the only true thing I felt was that even though he was dead, and had no sense of what was going on, he was disappointed. That cold, thoughtless body on the bed knew I was a failure, and I had no good reason for why I felt that in this moment, but that's all I could feel.

I racked my brain, focusing on the moment, trying to stop everything around me from moving and from my vision going black, and I tried to think of happy memories; an image of him smiling, or the sound of his laughter. I searched through the files of my memories for a fond Christmas, a good conversation, anything. But I couldn't come up with anything. The best thing I could remember was a few handshakes, and the time he said congratulations after my high school graduation, and the night he gave me the watch on my wrist. In our 21 years together hadn't he spared me a fond hug or a happy smile or even a dirty joke to laugh at? Or could I just not access any of those distant memories at the moment?

Everything in my body was hollow and empty except for the space behind my eyes. There was a hot pressure there that meant they wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn't come. They were blocked by a dam that wouldn't allow tears to flow. A dam built from years of the reinforcement from my family and from society that "real men don't cry." I became more sad, because I wanted to cry, and I wanted to show that I was sad, but I couldn't, and not being able to show sadness only builds more sadness.

I unclipped his watch from my wrist and kissed the face of it, then put it in my pocket. Like his brother before him, I put a hand on my father's shoulder. I said nothing aloud. Then I shook my head and walked out.