Friday

 “It’s hard work, dying.” He purses his lips & offers a bit of a shrug of the shoulders. His eyelids flutter & sag. The sheets drape over him & hang to the wooden floorboards like Georgian robes, folds of thick chiaroscuro in the half-light of this quiet room. We have said all of the things we wanted to say, returned to them, held them up to excavate for vestigial confessions, extant apologies, & we have found that nothing lingers unsaid. He starts a kind of slipping later, divorced from the catenary threads of logic woven of linear time. His utterances betray an impressionistic mind-- images seem to dance lambent in the forefront of his consciousness without the burden of relation. The morphine begins to shapeshift & assume his voice, for a time offering a prolonged series of proclamations so absurd & comically adrift that my Mom & I, standing on opposite sides of his bed, break into fits of irrepressible laughter. The laughter then stutters into tears & back again, the kinship between the two clearer than ever. Paroxysms of cackling, hand over mouth, & then convulsive sobs like seastacks dotting the tides, & then the brine of indistinguishable tears gathering on our lips. We are humans, after all, & like his own mind in telling, our hearing walks us down many avenues breaching a known map, such that we are in a wilderness of tender feeling without compass, without a foreknowledge of the journey’s duration. 

Now, though, he has fallen into sleep, deep & consuming. We gather with the shades pulled low, the oxygen tanks a hissing static in the room next door, sounding like whispers of the conspiratorial dead, adumbrated by the thin veil that keeps him, guards him, slow to relent & unclutch. 

He raises his arm in sleep as if holding a mug, feigns in perfect mimicry taking a slow sip & carefully putting down the dreamed of, the imaginary cup. He swallows & licks his dried, white lips & seems satisfied. I wonder what it was he drank. 

His body after a decade of myositis, sarcoidosis, degeneration & slow failure is mottled skin & brittle bone. His arm in moving the imagined cups evidences the basic biomechanics of the endeavor, showing plain the ball joints, the bone, the sheathing, in slow sequence. Nothing comes rapidly, nothing abruptly. We used to feed the dogs moose legs, & when they had pried the meat away, that same basic function of bone on display, reducing the heft of that massive animal to the dumbfounding simplicity of its machinations. My dad is not those bones, not that pallid skin. 

In the morning, the light gathers crisp & clean & falls angular over the snow-covered lawns & roofs. The birds alight on the feeders & neighbors stroll by in scarves & thick woolen hats, walking dogs that delight in the season. There are tracks on every slight rise or knoll where the neighborhood children dragged their sleds & pushed down in brief ecstasies to the lowlands. As I & my brothers did in years past, seeming not so long ago, & as my own kids do now. We are caught up in it, life. We are written by it & gathered in its dust. The robins pluck seed where the rabbit left a telltale track beneath the bough. The wind takes our breath & is gone.