Strong beginnings, hope, faith, and a misunderstanding blend into a happy misconception. “Will not get better,” didn’t necessarily mean that things will get worse. We all meet in my room, my brother and sister pile onto my bed as my parents sit down on the edge to tell us what is going on. Still we do not understand, still we have hope. As time drags on and things get worse, everyday becomes more hell like until I find my mind racing; the ranting of teachers becomes an indistinct buzzing in the background of my constantly racing thoughts that won’t stop coming no matter what I do, and all the while I understand more and more what is happening… but still, I have hope.
I watch as things get worse, he can barely walk the stairs now, let alone do things with me, and my love and pity for him make it unbearable. Even my unconscious is plagued by this hellish reality, and my dreams are now a pointless mire of scattered images and sounds from the day, with an overall sense of dread which turns my nights into hellish labyrinths of pain and sorrow. When he is admitted to the hospital, with a plan of treatment, things look up, hope is restored, but it is not meant to be. In everything the doctors do it is two steps forward, one step back, and his condition gets even more complicated. A deeper understanding begins to take a hold of me, and try as I might, I can’t deny it, he is getting worse, and as they said, he will not be getting better.
We have school, we can’t visit him all the time, we can’t be with him, and his absence has a profound effect on us all. I try to be strong, but my feelings of despair battle with my sense of duty like two raging bulls. Every time we visit him, he looks smaller, weaker. Tubes and sensors of all types surround him, and it strikes me how small his world has become. I would do anything to get him better, but what can I do that the doctors can’t? I can’t take it, but neither can I do anything to alter it, it’s the most frustrating feeling imaginable, to watch someone you love wither away like the leaves in fall, with no chance of ever being green again in the spring.
He can no longer walk, but while the weather is nice we take him outside, it is a bitter sweet moment as he feels the wind blowing on his face. It is an experience he will never have again. I talk to him, choking back tears so that I can be brave in front of him. He is hard to understand; his weakened immune system has caused his throat to develop sores that prohibit his speech. I am able to translate for my family; I won’t let anything stop him from talking to me.
When my family goes down stairs I stay with him, I am nervous, but I know he is still the same person on the inside. He holds my head as best he can, and I cry to him, my despair flowing out of me; my confusion, my anguish, my pain finally allowed to escape. He tries to calm me as he used to, and it to some extent works, but I only slightly sober, nothing can truly console me.
I still can feel his hands in my hair, on my face, it was one of the last times he held me in his life, and I will never forget it.
When my family got back, he talked to us about death; he told us he wasn’t afraid to die, and that we shouldn’t be afraid either… but we were all afraid. His procedures were not going well, his deteriorating health made it impossible for them to treat the cancer, and we all knew that it was only a matter of time until he left us behind. We brought him home, so he could spend his last days in a familiar place, and I spent every moment that wasn’t wasted at school by his side. Fuck anything that took me away from him, he wasn’t going to leave without a very long goodbye.
The day it happened was one of the most normal days of school in my life. I had no feeling of dread or apprehension, I was going to go home and stay by my dad like every other day since he had been home. I had even told him so the night before, “I’ll see you after school tomorrow,” I said. When school let out my Uncle picked me up and said he was taking me out to get a suit for my confirmation, which was in a few weeks. I went with him because I had no other choice, but when I couldn’t find a suit that fit, we gave up and went back home. When I arrived after picking my brother and sister up from various after school activities, we went home, but I knew from the moment I opened the door that something was wrong. My mom and grandmother were standing there, tears in their eyes, and when I glanced to where my dad’s room was, it was empty. I realized that my Uncle’s shopping outing had been just a means to keep me from home, until things had been taken care of. To an onlooker, it must have seemed like the most poignant showing of grief imaginable, but to us, it was just a family holding on to each other, trying to feel through our chilled bodies. My mom asked if we wanted anyone to come over, and I immediately said my cousin Tim, who was and is my best friend and partner for life. He comforted me as best he could, which was little, since we are both so close that the death of either of our fathers would devastate us equally.
The days to come were a blur, the wake was a torture from hell, which lasted seemingly forever do to the hundreds of people who showed up. The funeral home said that it was the largest group they had ever had, and the line to come in went on for several blocks. As my cousin’s Aunt Rudy put it, “He touched a lot of people, most just touch themselves.”
The funeral was nice, if that is what one would call it. It was certainly a somber ordeal, with plenty of crying, but my main memory of it is when my little sister’s soccer team, which my dad had coached, walked up to pay their respects, all of them wearing the team uniform. It ended with us all touching his coffin one last time, before walking out to the rest of the funeral goers. My 11 year old cousin said that our faces when we touched that cold, glistening, black box, was one of the saddest things he had ever seen, which was profound coming from an 11 year old. The days and weeks after were painful, to grossly understate it, and my birthday, which occurred less than a month later, made me even sadder. The summer was my brief respite from school, and now that it has started again, I find that I don’t really care about it, but oddly I am trying harder than ever to succeed. It’s profound to me, that you can live with someone for your entire life, until they become such a part of your life, your story, that it seems impossible for the story to continue even after that person is gone. That’s what life is however, a series of painful stories, and without pain, we cannot grow.
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