Personal Narrative: My Father's Death

Thick layers of smoke and tobacco cloud my earliest memories. I remember my father’s hand cutting through the wispy trails in a casino restaurant, back in the day when you could smoke in a restaurant. I also remember the week his body was loaded into a hearse - the years of cheap cigarettes and ubiquitous puffs of smoke invading his lungs finally caught up to him. The day seemed as mundane as any other day. I rolled my eyes when I saw my mother calling. Couldn’t she just text me? I thought. “Your father is sick,” she said in her accent. “Come to the hospital.” I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived. Then I saw him. He was pale and gaunt - the color from his face drained, leaving a ghostly visage I barely recognized. The hospital bed

“-it’s about how doctors die-” “Doctors? Where? What doctors?” “-it’s in my files-” “Files? What files?” “Just listen!” my father snapped. I looked out the window. I tried to find my parents house, even though I knew it was impossible. A white bird flew overhead. A car had a dent in the passenger side door. A yellow piece of debris fluttering into the side of the hospital and fell. Two people in scrubs stood outside by a shrub and talked. “There’s an article from Reader’s Digest in my files,” he instructed, each word said like a task given to Hercules from the king Eurystheus. “It’s about how doctors die. They die in their homes. I want you to look into care outside the hospital. Where Mom was before she died. I don’t want to be here. What’s the place Mom was before she died?” “Hospice,” I answered, still trying to find something, anything else, to look at. “Yes, that,” he said. “Hospice?” my mother asked. “Kido, do you know what that is?” “Yeah, it’s, um,” I hesitated, trying not to let my voice break. “They, um. They help with, um, sickness, I think. People who are

He was in the middle of the living room, writhing on a bed. He wore a diaper and a shirt that kept coming up. His eyes were yellow and glazed, looking at nothing in particular. His distended chest was purple from the injection sites. He was wheezing and kicking at something that wasn’t there. A thin tube of liquid attached him to a machine that compressed and ticked. I smelled something strange and astringent, like rotting eggs, blood, and antiseptic. My mother and my uncle were watching the technician setting up the machine, asking him questions. “Hey, Mick!” my mother called to my father. “Kido is here! With Jon!” The technician told us that a night nurse was coming over later and, after he finished with the machine, he left. Then we sat in silence. Jon held my hand and I just watched my father fling his arms at his sides and snore. He was in the home he purchased, hopped up on drugs, struggling to breathe, and wearing a diaper. I looked around. At my mother’s yard sale nicknacks, at the things that were shoved against the wall to make room for the bed, at the family photos, at my mother’s sewing machine, at my shoes that had goddamn skulls on