Let Him Have That

by Michael Kiggins

Too soon after the nurse warned all of us gathered around the ICU bed that it wouldn’t be long now, my father started groaning and raised his skinny right arm, reaching out and up as far as he could.

Across from me, my step-mother begged God to make it stop.

As much as I wanted to console her, a part of me knew my father’s life had already ended, that this action was a pebble tumbling into a valley, ricocheting off every surface it could, like that borrowed momentum would stop the inevitable.

Once my father’s time of death was called, I rushed down the hall and dry-heaved into a toilet. Afterwards, acid seared my throat no matter how many handfuls of water I cupped from the sink.

A decade later, a friend from another life who’s a nurse told me, “That happens a lot.” Her tone was soft and her face looked open. I didn’t know what mine looked like. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a reflex I’ve seen so many times.”

Despite myself, I wondered if my father who’d once crawled out of a jungle after a bad parachute landing had still been in there, somewhere. If that reflex had been accompanied by thought, giving purpose to instinct.

But maybe it would have been better if my father hadn’t been aware of anything after he’d been put into a medically induced coma, hadn’t heard the gasps of shock and sorrow when we first saw him suddenly so frail or noticed the few days we sat around his bed watching him fade as the urine filling the drainage bag darkened from mustard yellow to brown, hadn’t felt our hands on his or our tears fall upon his skin, and hadn’t listened to our regrets, especially when I confessed how I’d sent his final call to me straight to voicemail because I was hungover and running late for work and so tired of having the same conversation over and over again, not knowing that it would have been our last, that this one could have been different, because the following day he’d be sedated and never regain consciousness.

Let him have left this world knowing he had survived the cancer that all of his doctors worried would kill him. Let his shoulders finally relax as he breathed with lungs which had never felt lighter after over half-a-century of smoking. Let him be certain that he’d greet tomorrow ready to begin anew, if only a little groggier than usual, his disorientation fading with his first mug of coffee in the kitchen, after which he’d go to McDonald’s where he’d drink several more cups of mostly sugar topped off with their fresh-brewed swill while finishing the daily crossword in pen, never doubting any of his answers.

Let him have that.