I sat by his bedside the day my father died.
The cancer that had riddled his body and soul now had complete control.
He fought kicking and screaming
the night the men in white came to take him on his final journey
like a great wildebeest struggling to get up on its front legs after being taken down by young lions. The way so many had said he
probably would since he fought his way tooth & nail throughout his life from the very beginning.
That night I sat on a chair at the foot of his bed staring out the huge ceiling to floor window of the medical centre at the many worlds hidden beneath thousands of rows of stationary lights and fluid winding rows of transient lights in-between and thought how the light of this window is just one of many thousands.
At that moment it seemed more like just one tiny speck in the vast star fields worlds above this city of light.
My father had spent most of his life just a short six-mile drive from here under the scattered lights of his hometown.
He turned to me and asked,
“That’s a big city. Where are we?"
Dementia had claimed his mind ten or more years earlier. It
slowly wound its way around his brain like a cocky snake
handler being choked by a boa constrictor unawares.
It seemed like it all caught up to his body. But it was good to see much of the bitterness and bad blood between us dissipated over the past decade.
On that night compassion ruled the day.
I could not say it then but it has been many years, where it seems compassion has forged with objectivity.
In a lucid moment he looked around the hospital room
bewildered as if he were a little boy who just woke up from a bad dream and asked,
“How did this ever happen?"
If only I could have told him.
Sometimes the truth cannot be spoken or heard. All I could do then was sit by his bed and lean in close to his ear and sing softly his favourite hymns.
By morning his lifeless
dilapidated body lay in the fetal position. His once ravenous mouth now forever frozen looked like a knothole in a twisted cedar tree.
All I can do now is hang my head and think of how weak and frail we humans truly are.
Like compassion forged with objectivity, weakness and frailty forges with fleeting moments of strength. We forge heroes out of these moments to tower above
the pedestals the former is made of to somehow minimize the pain of this often denied truth.
©2017 Daniel Irwin Tucker
My wife & I were in the fortunate
position to put our life on hold and
travel to the U.S. to help my mother
and my 2 sisters take care of my
dying father. She wanted to keep
him in the comfort of his own home. We are so thankful that we were able to be there for five months.
