My
father’s hearing is starting to go;
he chooses
to miss things, refuses an aid,
doesn’t
hear the 2 a.m. phone
call. I am the one who tells him
five hours
later, Lee passed in the night.
I am the
one who absorbs his shock
and sob. I
thought he was prepared
but bad news is like that. She is the second
wife he
has survived, the first my mother
twenty-five
years ago. When I arrive
at his
door that day, we make our usual
resemblance of an embrace, his eighty-eight
year old
frame bent into a C, keeping
his heart
from me. We sit side by side on the sofa,
the
vintage flowered wallpaper suddenly
alive as
if communing with Lee’s wild
garden outside the front window, the roses
bloom that
week. I rub his bony back like
he is my
child. The only other time I saw
him cry, at LAX arrivals,
my daughter three weeks old, my mother
two weeks gone. Me seeing him, him seeing
mine, all that living and dying, all that
unreasonable pain.
I missed
my mother’s funeral, too soon
after
birth to fly. My father tells me he is the same sad
now as
then and I feel betrayed. My parents
married
forty-one years, isn’t time how you
measure grief? He writes a eulogy
for Lee,
then falters, I agree
to stand
in for him. He depends on me
that
way. I take him to doctor appointments,
repeat orders. He does what he likes, ignores
the rule
about salt, declines a daily walk.
We know he
won’t live forever, but jesus
he has to
try. He returns home, lives with my
brother in the old house. Everyone else
helps. Some days I feel like seaweed
come loose
from the ocean floor, unmoored,
drifting away until you can’t see me.
I am no
longer the mother.
No one is the mother now.
Stoneboat Literary Journal, Spring 2019