So when he got cancer, I wasn’t exactly heartbroken. And neither, apparently, was anyone else in the family.
“He Keeps Asking If You’ll Come”
Weeks went by, and I kept hearing the same thing from my mom. “You should visit him.” I always had an excuse ready. School. Work. I’m busy. I’ll go next week.
Then one day she said quietly, “He keeps asking if you’ll come.”
That got to me. Not because I thought he loved me. Something about that sentence just made me feel like I owed him a debt I couldn’t quite name. Or maybe I simply didn’t want to feel like a bad person for the rest of my life.
So I went.
For illustrative purposes on
The Hospital Room
The hospital room smelled sterile, quiet in that particular way that makes your skin crawl. He looked smaller than I remembered. Weaker. His sharp voice, the one that used to fill entire rooms, was gone completely.
He didn’t criticize me. He didn’t say much of anything at all.
We just sat there. A few awkward sentences. Long, heavy pauses between them. I remember thinking, this is pointless.
