“You should spend some time with him,” she encourages, much like my mom has done numerous times.
Yet today, I can no longer avoid that room. I can no longer head back to the ranch and put all of my focus on work.
I nod, squeezing my eyes shut in an attempt to ward off the tears stinging the backs of my eyes, and Anne must realize I need a moment alone because her soft footsteps fade away as she leaves the room.
Standing at the sink, I take a little longer than I should, but then a sense of urgency forces me to move. When I leave the kitchen, I see Mom crying on the sofa, the chaplain’s arms wrapped around her sobbing shoulders as he whispers quietly to her. She nods in understanding to whatever he’s telling her, but his soothing words do nothing to staunch the tears rolling down her ashen face.
I don’t even pause when I reach their bedroom door. I open it and step inside, trying to picture my father as the vibrant man he was in so many of my childhood memories, but even as I try to project those images in my mind, there’s no way I can unsee my withering father.
With sunken cheeks and ashen, discolored skin, the man in the bed is unrecognizable. It’s unfathomable how quickly cancer can destroy a person, destroy a family.
But no matter my own feelings or the pressing need in my blood to run, I step inside and close the door behind me. His ragged breaths fill the silence as regret swims in my gut, threating to expel the few bites of lunch I was able to manage before giving up on the meal.
He deserves more.
He deserves a son that stuck by his side during the last weeks of his life.
He deserves to stay on this earth and live a healthy, long life.
“Dad?” I whisper as I draw closer to the bed.
He doesn’t respond. He hasn’t had a second of consciousness in days, and I’ve missed my opportunity to tell him a million different things I know he needs to hear before he’s gone, things he shouldn’t leave this world without knowing.
I take his hand as I sit in the hard chair by his bed, doing my best not to flinch at how cold his skin is already.
“You are an amazing father.” I choke on a sob, unable to hide the emotion.
Needing to do something other than sit here and cry, I smooth out the blankets on his chest as hot tears make salty trails down my cheeks before dripping from my chin.
“Even though I didn’t tell you or prove it with my actions, I love you. I couldn’t have asked for a better man to raise me.”
The lump is still lodged in my throat, but I don’t think it matters that my words are coming out filled with gravel. I wish I could’ve told him these things while he was lucid and able to hear me, but I continue speaking.
“You are the best role model a young man can have, and if I grow up to be even half the man you are, I think I’ll be doing well.”
I don’t bother to swipe away the tears falling like rivers onto our combined hands.
“You’re my best friend, my hero, the example I try to emulate in my own life.”
I don’t confess that I haven’t been the man he expects me to be this summer. That regret is something I’ll have to live with, not something I want him taking with him when he leaves us.
“I don’t know how we’ll make it without you, Dad.”
I lift my eyes to the ceiling, wanting, needing to beg for more time, for better health, willing to barter anything imaginable to just keep him a little while longer.
For all my intentions to keep things positive, I sit with him for hours, telling him every bad thing I did growing up. I confess to breaking the handle off his favorite saw, to setting the small fire in our own barn when I was ten, and to sneaking out of the house last fall to go to a party he strictly forbade me from attending. I don’t leave out cheating on my math test or kissing Brooke Reiser even though I knew she had a boyfriend.
Most importantly, I don’t stay silent about how much I hate God for what he’s putting us through, for the aftermath of what’s going to be left behind.
By the time Mom joins me in the room, my sobs have quieted, even though my tears refuse to dry up. I don’t head back to the ranch, and I don’t bother calling Mrs. Jacobson to let her know what’s going on. I don’t answer my texts when my phone buzzes with a message from Rowdy wondering where I disappeared to.