End of an Era

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My father is dying. He’s in the oncology ward at Toronto’s Wellesley Hospital, cancer eating away at his colon, his rectum—parts of the body people think it’s funny to talk about.

It’s unfair having to see him like this. How am I going to remember him when he’s gone? As I knew him from childhood—a temperamental giant who used to carry me on his shoulders, who used to play catch with me even though I couldn’t throw for beans, who used to tuck me in and kiss me good night, his face like sandpaper against my cheek? I don’t want to remember him like this, shrunken and old, an anorexic mummy with rheumy eyes and varicose face, tubes in his arms, tubes up his nose, drool staining his pillow.

“Dad…”

“Brandon.” He coughs twice. Sometimes he coughs more, but it is always an even number. They rack his body in pairs, these coughs, like one-two punches from a wily heavyweight. “Brandon,” he says again, as if the coughs have erased the earlier uttering of my name. I wait for the words that always come next. “Long time no see.”

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