Death has been playing with my Dad, toying with him like a sated cat who must keep the mouse alive until he’s hungry again.
Swat, went Death, who knocked the feeling right out of my father’s left leg.
Death threw my father high in the air, and the pause before he landed was the last one in which his lungs could inflate fully.
Thwack, went Death, whose claws poked holes in my father’s kidneys, ruining them forever.
Death nudged my father’s spine smack up against the wall until the vertebrae unlocked, one by one.
My father, limping and wheezing, curved and bent, retreated just out of sight.
For a while, at least.
It’s just a matter of time before I get the call telling me my father didn’t escape the reach of Death.
Steinbeck reminded us that although mice and men both share the fate of mortality, it is the mouse that is blessed because it has no awareness of this. My father never read that book, so the idea that he is now simultaneously man and mouse is solely mine, yet another idea that widens the gap between an elderly father and his only daughter. We are separated, my father and I, by time zone, by generation, by gender, but perhaps what most divides us is none of these. He lives and will die in the life of the literal. For him there is no character named Death, not in any form, not a reaper nor a cat. For him there is no meaning under the surface. There are only events.
Soon there will be the final event. I’ll get the call just before it, during it, maybe right after. I will upturn every memory, every action, every word I can recall, and those I can’t, seeking the meaning, the literary references, the metaphors that make it possible for me to continue living in a world that doesn’t contain the one man who has been there all along. The constant when others left; the one to welcome me back after every absence.
I used to think my father lacked poetic grace, yet what else is the unwavering love of a father for his only daughter if not Poetry?
Thwap.
Death has been clawing to the far reaches for my father, slowly pulling him out from his hiding place, replacing living breath with crevasses of pain.
Death will win this game of cat and mouse.
I will lose the mouse and the man, the one man it took Death to pry away from me, the one whose poetry I have finally understood.