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, his black hair still tousled with sleep. 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. 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 . . .