He did not die

Here's a piece honouring my dad that I read aloud tonight at the Moosemeat Chapbook launch: 

"I'm still enjoying life," he says as the month of June begins. We've just been walking.  Now he sits beneath a tree.    

       Weeks later comes a celebration for the anniversary of my birth. The neighbours bring champagne. He smiles, takes some sips, then has to go upstairs to rest.

       His weight slips away.  My mother brings his meals on trays. One morning as he weeps he tells me of a nightmare: frozen Boost impersonating ice cream, Ensure in his coffee in place of milk. "It's terrible stuff," he says, still shaken from the visions.

       At the clinic the hematologist places a cuff over his arm, takes his pressure, says he is very unwell. We all know this. He prescribes a trip to the emergency room.  There I watch the monitor as a transfusion flows in.  I look up when someone parts the curtain. It's the oncologist. He's brought the test results. All those visits to the lab for the gamma rays to work their magic, they have not been  effective. There is no other treatment.

       The next morning my father chats with a nurse. "They can't figure out what's wrong with me," he chuckles. "I guess I'm a puzzle." He's forgotten the oncologist's explanation. He's in a room now, four floors up from the ER. He's enjoying the view of the trees, the river.

       My father is still my father then. Still thoughtful. Still gentle. He shows the nurse his toiletry bag, a worn, khaki thing he ties shut with a ribbon. He explains it was his father's from the first great war. My father is 89. His toiletry bag is more ancient than he is. The army built things to last. The nurse smiles at this.

       The new specialist comes by. She's younger than I am. Beneath her white coat she wears a shift the colour of coral.

       "How long?" my father asks. "Years? Months?" 

       "Less than that," she replies.

       His ability to speak goes next. "I  guess  I'm  not  perfect," is the last sentence he utters.

One night I lie next to him, whispering memories from my youth. His game of "No jiggles!"; his first visit to my summer camp; the time he took my mom to the Chateau Grill for their anniversary. "I was watching TV that night when the phone rang," I say. "It was you. You forgot your wallet."  His last laugh is a grunt.

At some point his fingers start tugging restlessly, relentlessly at the catheter in his penis. Later, his fingers lie still.

His breathing comes fast, like he's running a marathon. This goes on for hours. I play cribbage with my mother. Then his breath grows even more violent, with a crackle beneath it. I stroke his arm. "It's okay to go now," I say. He cries out. It's a groan that goes on forever, as if a weight is pushing every molecule of breath out. Shallow pants follow. Then all is still. Next to my palm, his skin turns thick.

Beneath that tree in June he was alive, he was my father. When did that end? When did he die? It is a question I cannot answer.