Waiting in the Trees

“Your father’s treatment isn’t working,” the fragility in her voice broke through her attempts to portray confidence. With these words, the emotions that I had so desperately tried to contain finally escaped. I collapsed onto the floor of the TV room, my heart burning with the erasure of my ignorance. 

I managed to get myself into the car. I was on my way to the hospital, ready to see my dad with a fresh pair of eyes, eyes informed with the knowledge of the inevitable. I entered the room and saw him lying on a mattress pooled upon the floor. Blankets, pill bottles, and bandages surrounded him, spilling off into the corners of the room. He had rejected a bed, despite the discomfort he felt. He had always said that he found the floor more comfortable, one of the many ways he rejected conformity. He looked up at me, said my name, and motioned for me to sit next to him. After maneuvering around the clutter and tangled IV lines, I felt the warmth of his skin, a reminder of life in a place that felt full of death.

Too weak to walk, we helped him into a wheelchair and pushed him to the car. It was a cold January night, and we wrapped him up with jackets and blankets, trying to make up for the thinness of his skin. 

“Is there anything else I can do?” I asked in a shaky voice. 

“No, no, this should be enough,” he said looking up at me. “I love you.” I heard the fear within his voice, and I could see the despair in his eyes. 

“I don’t know what to do… I just don’t want you to go.” I replied.

“Alec, I’ll always be in the trees. Remember that.” He looked back down and adjusted some of the blankets.

Once home, he requested to be on the floor of the TV room. It seemed fitting, I thought. My ignorance had died in this room and now, my dad would die here as well. From that point on, his physical and mental health declined rapidly. Overnight, he went from carrying a conversation to yelling the sporadic remarks of a madman. The words “STOP” and “LEAVE NOW” rang throughout the house as he spoke to my family, delirious to the world around him.

I asked him if he would make it to my birthday which was three weeks away. He shook his head. It would be a week, he told me. In those seven days of utter devotion, I saw more death than life; I felt more pain than pleasure; and I heard more cries than laughter. From my bedroom, just down the hall, the cries of a man losing his grasp on reality never went unheard. As I slept, I was awakened by these cries, a summons to rise and fight the father I once knew.

Each day he drifted further from reality, losing touch with life, capable only of staring out the window, gasping for air. No one knew if he could really see or feel or think, but we treated him as if he could. 

Each day I was by his side, sitting in reverence, watching the gray pigment creep up his fingertips and into his eyes. I put my forehead upon his and embraced the dwindling warmth it gave me. The warmth carried me, letting me believe that it gave him strength and a final memory of me, a lie that carried me through those days. I had to do this, had to let my mind wander through the spaces on the edge of reality, living in moments where death only existed in the background of my thoughts. 

I found myself staring at the speckles of marble ingrained in the kitchen table, my eyes diving into the deep veins in the stone, imagining a protected world within where my dad was healthy. I could see him across a forested valley. He was taking a photo of a redwood isolated in a pile of rocks. I could see his focus and determination as he searched for the angle that captured the emotional value he felt towards the landscape, a determination to capture a sense of belonging that he felt in the trees. For the first time in a while, I felt content.

“Alec, what are you doing?” asked my mom. “You’re supposed to be eating dinner.”

I was yanked back into the reality of the situation. My dad was not well. 

I excused myself from the table and went upstairs. I felt drawn to his room.  With each step, my legs weakened and the knot in my stomach tightened, but the pull was unavoidable. The darkness of the room spilled out, overpowering the light that used to illuminate the hall, in an unstoppable march of death. I could hear the pump of the oxygen machine going up and down. I didn’t want to enter the darkness, but the machine called out to me, compelling me to come closer. I held my breath in anticipation and walked through the doorway. I saw my dad lying there in the darkness. His eyes, wide open, stared out the window. He couldn’t move, talk, or see. Only breathe.

I sat down next to him and wondered what he would miss. Tears rushed to my eyes, drawing blood to my cheeks and nose. I put my head on his chest and cried. I heard his heart beating, dragging him along the path of life by a thread. With each thump, it pulled him further and further along, the thread closer to snapping, moving towards a goal both invisible and inevitable. Then he was let go, gone, sprawled out with his thread cut in two.

An eerie blanket of silence fell over the room. One second everything, the next nothing. I continued to lie there as if nothing had happened. My head pounded with the realization of what had occurred, but my heart rejected the demands of reality. I sat there, my spirit dissociated from my emotions, as I toyed with the material world that surrounded me.

Downstairs, people were eating dinner, unaware of how reality had changed. I had news that would change their lives forever, but they didn’t need to know quite yet. In my world, dad was dead, but in theirs he was alive. I was God for a moment, letting them live in their ignorance. But I was limited, a God who only had purview over death. Before the weight of responsibility crushed me, I walked into the hallway. Knowing the pain these words would carry, I said them from above, standing at the top of the stairs: “Dad died.”