I Remember

    I remember crying myself to sleep at night while my father was in the hospital. I remember thinking that the sadness would never end, that he would be in that hospital bed until the day he died, which regretfully was true. In the beginning he was just going in for a simple heart surgery. The chances of him surviving weren’t great, but he had a better chance of survival if he were to have the surgery. The surgery went well, all except for the excessive amount of bleeding that my father did (we later found out that this was because they let a student operate and he cut too deep). The doctor’s said that he would be fine, which… he was, for the most part. The gapping hole they left in his stomach got infected with gang green. The days at the hospital turned to weeks in the ICU. My father’s muscles began to deteriorate while his skin began to yellow and thin. I remember the first time I braved the walk to his hospital room. He was swelled up like a pucker fish and hooked up to an array of green, blue, red, and clear tubes. Just when I was entering his room he broke in to convulsions, seizures, which the doctor’s described as “normal”. The second time I braved my way to his side he was withering away. My plump father was nothing more than a pile of sagging skin and bone. I remember having to put on gloves just to be able to touch him and taking those gloved hands and rubbing lotion on his frail body and cracked skin.
    The third time I made it to his room he was laying up right slightly, coherent. He was unable to talk yet due to the tubes still down the hole in his throat but he had gained enough strength in his hand to scribble little desires and demands. Little demands such as wanting me out of the room.
    The fourth and final time I saw him he was sitting upright in a chair next to his bed. The same old daddy I knew and remembered, the jokester, the flirt, the life of the party, the protective lion, the always smiling ray of light. When I walked through those doors he was glowing and happy. I remember telling him he looked like papa smurf because of the blue dye that was dribbling and drying on his chin left over from his swallowing test. The doctors had taken the tubes out of the hole in his throat and he could talk to me now, but not much was said between us, we just stared at each other, me with my fearful, hopeful eyes, and him with his bright expectant eyes and ear to ear smile. The next day I found out that he had passed away. He was ready for physical therapy all except for his low potassium level. The doctors gave him too much potassium however and he had a massive heart attack and died on the spot. 
    I remember thinking it was all a dream, I screamed at my mother to take me back to the hospital, I told her over and over again that I could prove he was still there. I remember my family going into hysterics, my cousins running off and hiding, my grandmother screaming tears of sadness, and my mother groping at me holding me to her in an attempt to console me all the while I was trying to escape her grasp.
    I remember the viewing, falling to my knees at the sight of him by his casket. I remember the funeral and feeling as though I were in a horror movie, how his beautiful Masonic funeral was ruined by the wind, knocking over the rose petals, the white gloves, and the pine twig and how I stumbled trying to pick it all back up bursting with new tears. And last, I remember going to his grave sight and falling to my knees with realization finally that he wasn’t coming back. Feverishly I dusted off his tomb stone of all dirt and I softly lay my head on his name on the ground and just wept, my salt tears mixing with the dirt.