The Final Goodbye

The thought that she may never see her father again after tonight had never crossed her mind. It just wasn’t possible. After all, people were admitted to the hospital every day and many of them got to go home afterwards. Didn’t they? It wasn’t an option that he might not leave this place, with its pale walls and loathsome linoleum flooring and palpable stench of decaying life. She couldn’t imagine a worse place to lose him than here. He deserved something better, something more dignified. Rustic and warm. Something more him. But most of all, he deserved life.
She had smelled his sour, heavily medicated breath when she’d hugged him that morning. It was the beginning of the end, though she didn’t realize it at the time. The chemotherapy drugs that promised a cancer-free life seemed to be rotting him from the inside out. What good were they anyway? They had stolen his thoughts, his looks, his livelihood—and what had they given back? A few months of life with a quality so awful it almost wasn’t worth it. 
Almost.
It was sometime after dinner when he’d started having trouble breathing. Their stomachs were still full and their hearts, hopeful. His knuckles had turned ghostly white, intensely gripping the arms of the chunky recliner he sat in, in the corner of the living room, in an attempt to inhale. It was the first time she’d seen panic on his face. He’d always been so strong, so brave. Her protector.
She knelt on the floor at his side, silently crying into his heaving chest. I love you dad, she whispered, too softly for him to hear over his sharp, short gulps of air. When she pulled back, she saw a patch of wetness on his forest-green crewneck. 
The ambulance arrived within minutes and whisked them off to the emergency room—her in the passenger seat, her father on a stretcher in the back. Beside her, the sleepy-eyed paramedic attempted to make conversation, but she wasn’t in the mood for small talk. She wasn’t in the mood for any kind of talk. Her thoughts ran wild with a sense of foreboding. Will he be okay? What if he isn’t? What’s happening to him? Why tonight? What about his parents, her grandparents? They couldn’t lose a second son. It was unfathomable. 
She stayed with her father while they admitted him, holding his hand, something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl, and reassuring him as much as herself that things would be fine. Of course everything would be. They could even have dessert when they got back to the house, if he wanted. There was cake on the counter.
“Any pre-existing illnesses we should know about?” one of the nurses asked, pen clicking along a chipped clipboard.
“No,” replied her father.
“He has brain cancer,” she corrected. Did he forget? To her, it felt inconceivable. Then again, her brain was fine. Had his cancer spread? Was it worse than his doctor had thought at the last check-up? Grade four glioblastoma wasn’t like losing your keys. Although he’d lost far more than that in the last six months: his home, his job, his independence.
He was whisked away and now she waited in the claustrophobic lobby that provided little comfort—in both the physical and emotional sense. The clock on the wall seemed to mock her with each passing second. Tick, tock, tick, tock. First ten minutes lumbered by, then twenty, thirty. What was taking so long? Where was he? Why had no one updated her? Her crossed leg trembled, in a panic, as if she were subconsciously trying to run as far away from the hospital and its sickly staleness as she possibly could. Her sweater itched and she thought, in hindsight, she should’ve chosen a softer one. Or worn a long-sleeve underneath. Inconsequential things, in the weight of her current situation, but things that momentarily let her mind fret about something other than her father’s aggressively spreading tumor.
By the time her grandparents arrived, they were permitted to pass through the heavy, ominous doors that separated the distraught from the diseased. Her father was hooked up to an oxygen machine, among other tubes and sticky patches, and the sight of him frightened her. He’d never looked so fragile in his whole fifty years. However, he seemed to be able to breathe easier, which in turn helped her do the same. The three of them sat with him, quietly. What was there to say? She couldn’t think of a single thing that didn’t mimic a “get well soon” card. Only the sound of his mechanic inhales and exhales could be heard mingled with the distant chatter of nurses and hurried footsteps, echoing somewhere deep in the hospital’s endless, winding corridors.
“I feel really bad,” her father said suddenly, removing his mask, his expression anxious.
Then, everything changed.
His eyes rolled back into his infected skull; his body tensed, then shook. She let out a guttural scream before collapsing to the ground. It was like someone had taken a stick and smacked her in the back of her knees; they involuntarily gave out and she found herself sobbing in a helpless heap on the floor. Medical staff rushed past her as if she wasn’t there; true professionals. Her grandfather heaved her to her feet with arthritic hands. Jesus, oh Jesus, he whispered over and over although he wasn’t religious and never had been. Her grandmother wailed, a primal howl, for her first-born son.
She heard the buzz and then the crack of the defibrillator, powerlessly trying to shock her father back to life. It was no use. He was gone. She could feel it. The fate that she couldn’t have accepted mere hours earlier was now her reality, wrapping its warped fingers and claws around her throat, suffocating her. Was she going to die too? The violence of his death was so unlike him in life—she had always known him to be gentle, calm. He was a trickling creek in the middle of a rainforest.
She thought back to the summer, when they’d sat on the beach in front of their simple cabin, feeling the warmth of the sand beneath their legs, sipping their morning coffees as they watched the gently lapping tide flow in and out, lost in the beauty of nature.
“What’s the first thing you want to do when you get better?”
He’d contemplated this for a short while. Then he answered assuredly, “Go to Alaska. I’ve always wanted to go there.”
As she sat, frozen, beside the swollen, motionless body that once housed her father, she couldn’t help but think of all the things he’d never get the chance to do. He would never celebrate his fifty-first birthday, which was just three weeks away. He wouldn’t go to Alaska. When she finally had kids, he would never know what being a grandfather was like. Who would teach them how to pitch a tent, sail a boat, or tie a bowline knot, his favorite? He wouldn’t ever do any of the things he loved ever again. It was unfair. Cruel.
Tears slid freely down her cheeks without pause, under her chin, down her neck. She was drowning in a pool of her own grief.
They don’t tell you about this when someone dies—how they change. As the hours passed, his complexion took on a splotchy, bruise-like coloring. His mouth hung slightly agape and his eyes were, thankfully, closed, as if in a deep slumber. When her lips touched his forehead for the very last time, his mottled skin was ice-cold. It sent chills rippling through her. None of them wanted to leave him, but they couldn’t stay forever.
“Goodbye dad,” she softly wept. “I love you.”
She took one last lingering glance at the corpse that, although resembled her father in some ways, looked entirely different. It wasn’t him anymore. It would never be him again. All she had now were the memories that she was afraid to forget but at the same time terrified to remember.
One day she would no longer fear the past or the events of tonight. She wouldn’t think of him as this startling stranger but as the man who’d held her hand when she was young and listened when she needed advice and told her, I love you too much to stop you from doing whatever you want in life. The man who upon announcing his terminal diagnosis advised her to “have fun and be happy” and not worry about him. The man who made pancakes on Sundays and ran marathons for fun. 
The man who had battled brain cancer for exactly one-hundred and eighty-three days. April to October. 
But for now she would let herself grieve, for as long as it took.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ