I feel my stomach clench, and I brace myself. I know, after all, how my father surely wants someone to be here to take care of me when he isn’t. Who could blame him? Hell, I should get married for that reason alone.
“I know,” I say. “He’s kind and considerate, and he always leaves the toilet seat down. He’s honestly perfect.”
My father takes a sip of coffee and then looks back up at me. “He is,” he says. “But that doesn’t matter much if he isn’t perfect for you.”
I think about Jake proposing at Moonshadows, all the hope in his heart—all the hope hepresentedto me. I took it. I wanted to. But this hope feels heavy, too heavy to hold. I want lightness.
“He’s willing to sign up for all of this,” I say. “And it’s not fair.”
My father’s voice is gentle. “What, exactly?”
I feel my throat constrict. I don’t like to talk about my heart with my father. Not because it’s painful for me but because it is for him. I don’t like to remind him what isn’t fair to him, either. But I put that aside now. Because I need to say it. “That I’ll leave him. That I’m forcing him to sign up for this at all. That I can’t promise him another day.”
I see the gravity of this settle on my father. He sets his mug down. He comes around the counter and puts his hands on my shoulders. I look into his warm, brown, caring eyes. I see so much there—the wrinkles around his forehead, the gray hair at his temples. All the signs of someone growing old, the way the thickness of life recedes and recedes until it’s translucent.
“Chicken,” he says. The lines around his mouth wobble. I can see how much effort it is taking to say what he does next. “I think about you all the time. Most of the moments of my day, in fact. Even when I’m doing something, at the market or on a run, I’m thinking about you. I’m thinking about how much I want you to be well. I’d give anything to fix it so that you could be. I pray for it every night. I have for thirteen years. If you knew the bargains I have tried to make with the universe—” His voice breaks and his eyes fill up. He shakes his head. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I do not wish it was me. Hell, they made a mistake, Daphne. It should have been.”
“Dad—”
“That’s what we do for our children. We wish it were us.”
I feel the warmth of his strong and steady palms.
“But the thing is, Daphne. No one’s time is promised. Notyours. Not Mom’s. Not mine. Not Jake’s. It’s just the way it is. We are all dying. Every day. And at some point it becomes a choice. Which one are you going to do today? Are you living or are you dying?”
My father looks right at me. His face is soft. He looks at me in a way I can only describe as open. I think, perhaps, this is the first time I have ever, in more than thirteen years, invited him to show me his grief.
“And, honey,” he says. “All I wish for you, for any of us, is to do the living one. To do it to the fullest. For as long as it lasts.”
Tears spill down his face. I’ve only ever witnessed my dad cry once, all those years ago, in a quiet corner of a hospital room.
My mother was asleep in a chair. They were running so many tests in those early days, and I was exhausted all the time. It felt like I was in a perpetual haze.
I awoke, but my eyes were still closed, and I heard my father next to me. No, I felt him. I felt his hand in mine, sitting right next to my hospital bed, and then his lips on my fingers and then the wet of his tears. I kept my eyes closed as he wept into my palm.
“Please,” I remember him whispering. Just the one word.Please.
“My child, my baby girl.”
I could feel the well of his grief, and I remember thinking I never wanted to see this much vulnerability from anyone ever again. I remember thinking:This is terrifying.
Looking at my father before me now, I realize how much I’ve been denying the people who love me. I didn’t want them to know I was in pain or short of breath. I didn’t want them to know the new drugs made me feel tired or heavy or anxious. I didn’t wantthem to know I thought about it—how much time I have left. I didn’t want my sickness reflected on their faces. But more than that, I didn’t want to see their own weakness. I didn’t want to feel their tender and heartbroken humanity. Because then it would confirm it all, everything I feared. That it was just as serious as I suspected. That I was in that much trouble.
It’s not bad, I think, as I watch my father cry now.It hurts and it’s painful, but it’s not bad.Pain and bad are not the same thing.
I thought if I had all the answers, if I was always one step ahead, if I knew my hand, then I’d never lose. But being surprised by life isn’t losing, it’s living. It’s messy and uncomfortable and complicated and beautiful. It’s life, all of it. The only way to get it wrong is to refuse to play.
I look at my father, and I see the man I saw in the hospital room all those years ago—broken and open. But where there was once helplessness there is now something else. These are not the tears of desperation but rather acknowledgment—of all we have accepted. Of everything we still do not know.
“He wants to protect me,” I say. “Jake does. But he can’t.”
My father laughs. It is a gentle laugh. A skip of a laugh. A little hop over sorrow. “Your mother started saying something to me right after my father died, and she kept telling me in those years after your diagnosis, too, when, damn, I needed to hear it.” He exhales. “Love is a net.”
He looks right at me. His eyes are gentle. I see in them the enormity of his grief, the enormity of his love.
“She would tell me all the time that the love we had mattered, that it could catch you, that itwascatching you.” He shakes his head. I see his mouth move, uneven, overcome. “So, no, he cannotgive you forty more years, but, baby, love is the most powerful force we’ve got. If you think protection isn’t in its jurisdiction, you’re wrong.”
I sit back. I suck in a breath.
