Our father won’t want to die. But he is curious, and I will see it when he finds a seam while everyone is sleeping and slips through.
Our father won’t want to die, but there will be the time we are all called at four am, Traumahawk having scraped him from the road, and we will be told to rush fast as they’re not sure how long they can keep him alive. I will hold his swollen hand, gashes in his forehead, and hear him laughing. I will have sunk a foot deeper in earth, but he’ll have slipped past the paddles and intubation; he’ll have found out how to fly. Wide swaths of Canadian forest disappearing beneath his flight, some memory of a crossroads he could have done life differently: a fishing trip, the kind of man he might be.
And they will bring him back.
Our father won’t want to die, but he is curious. There will be the time post-surgery, the crash cart called. His mother asking if we’ll not be on time for dinner reservations at the club, while the codes called over the Tannoy will be her son dying. Peter Pan, slipping shadow, he’ll go just out for a walk. It will be touch and go – now he knows how to slip out and slip back. I’ll feel him fly through my house, dip down low to check on my sons. Hear his laugh, feel his laugh, his voice asking, Are you seeing this?
Bring him back and bring him back, they will.
Our father won’t want to die, but there are vestiges of the crash, of the cancer, of the chemo. Vertigo that makes him scared to keep up his job, having almost fallen off the gangplank bringing clients off a boat. Medical bills he sells his house to pay. Eviction that leaves all his belongings piled by the Sheriff on the street, in the rain. A year spent living in his car. The distance between the shelter where he can sleep and the shelter where he can get a sandwich; the choice of the gas it would cost. A month in jail when he steals the car back from the dealership, too proud to say homeless or cancer or closed traumatic brain injury to ask the judge for mitigation.
Our father won’t want to die. Will tether himself down. A love, a home again. Habits of places he wanted all his life to be, restaurants where they order the same things, where they call out his name from the bar. But he will look at me – say my name – and I’ll see it in his eyes. The fear. The forest. The flight. Me, a foot deeper in earth for each time I’ve lost him.
Our father won’t want to die, but I will see it while family make the calls all around – those even-toned calls, the call expected, finally. While paramedics nudge and transport, while his children book flights, while words like cremation are given prices. I’ll see him feeling on the other side. For the way back.
At first, he’ll be fascinated, dying for someone to tell it to. His world now glowing green, back room of the mortician, watching them work. Want to tell it to me the way he came back from every adventure, telling me about the way things are done around the world. Manufacturing. Sales. Racing. Sailors’ knots. Business loans. Yard beers. Oysters. Marriages. Now this strange, secret knowledge: how the hose and spigot work, how they clean the body.
I’ll hate that he will know, just like he will have known when he flew through low over my sons: I could see. I knew. And that it will be my voice, the one to tell him, Not this time, Fa. The seam closed. This last time, they won’t let him back through.