We Call Him the Dancing Queen

 It's a rare sort of waltz that i think only Dad is capable of doing justice to. Of course, it never has been a solo effort at all; Mom and Uncle Paul expend a fair amount of energy to make everything happen smoothly. Uncle Paul is the only one that really complains about how taxing it is on his forearms (and even then he still boasts about how beefy his biceps are, can you believe that?). Mom is responsible for the left arm, and Uncle Paul the right. I'll take a leg if I'm feeling up to it (which I'm usually not, as horrible as that sounds).

 

The dance begins. Mom grips Dad's frail wrist in one hand and cradles his elbow in the other. She takes a deep breath and tenses her muscles, then begins to lift Dad's arm up and down to release the tension from the joints in his elbow. Chopin's Nocturne Op. 3 plays softly in the background, accompanied by the monotonous metronome of the Intensive Care Unit's blips and bleeps. They told us that the music is good for his brain. Uncle Paul stands on the other side of the bed and lifts in sync with my mom. The tempo increases momentarily and a new voice introduces itself into the polyphonic masterpiece. It's time to make my entrance. I grasp Dad's greasy yellow toes, being careful to avoid the cracked and rotting nails, and start pumping. Dad is fitted in a patient scrub decked out with a whole assortment of tiny little penguins, each wearing a different colored vest. Yellow foam booties stretch halfway up his brittle white shins.

 

The audience is weeping. Vivian sits in a corner next to a half-opened window. Her pretty little mouth is stuffed with thick waves of slightly disorderly brown hair, stifling sobs. The tiny snowball of crumpled kleenex in her clutches has clearly alreadly served its purpose, but knowing her she's probably too scared to look for the bathroom to replace it with a fresh wad of toilet paper. I don't blame her this time. Those sterile white walls are enough to make anyone at least a little bit nervous. Her tilted head rests on the bottom frame of a tackboard that is filled about two-thirds of the way with pictures. My favorite is the one on the bottom left-hand corner; the one that is currently partially obscured by a wild tuft of Vivian's hair. Dad is awkwardly perched on a bright red plastic stool, feeding a cream colored duck with one hand and holding a brown duck on his knee. He's wearing a checkered jacket from Wal-Mart and sporting a leather hat from Vermont. The eyes behind the spectacles have a gentle gleam of adoration in them, as if emanating soft sunshine.

 

We continue to press into his skin with our fingers, hoping to transfer the warmth of our bodies into his white, lifeless flesh. The soil is dead, but somehow the grass continues to grow. Whisps of grey peek out from his chin amidst bronze stubble, forming a beard that Dad never would have thought of growing before the incident. Perhaps I've made a taxonimical mistake; the grass is probably fungus, leeching the vitality from his bloodstream with twisting mycelial networks of deterioration.

 

I grasp the hand of a ghost. This is the left hand that had just been getting used to the feel of a green and black basketball from the Big 5 clearance bin. I closed my hands and watched him circle Del Prado Park at a saunter, concentratedly pounding the basketball into the sidewalk.

 

I shake his right hand just like I did at graduation. I'm surprised to find that our hands still communicate. It's cold, but I still probe for the callouses, blisters, and the wart just below the thumb. It asks me to hold on forever, at a whisper.

 

I wipe the sweat off his leathery brow and run my finger over the alternating valleys and ridges of a forehead that had been pressed to my own so many times back when I was younger.

 

I open up the patient scrub and see the red storm. The telltale marks of countless procedures. The puncture in his chest where his flesh yearned for the knife.

 

He lies in the hospital bed still breathing, components somehow woven together delicately with a divine thread. His tangled limbs lie constrained inside the silvery meshes of an uncertain cocoon. To awaken and take flight again, or to decay with this confounded breathing machine? I suppose the decision's far from being mine.

All we can do is wait it out. Is this what it's like, to be in love with an angel?

Reviews

[Emily B]

the thing I remember most about my mother-in-law's last days in her fight with cancer, was the hospice nurse fussing at me because I refused to wear the plastic gloves. I just couldn't see how anyone would expect me to touch her skin wearing those horrid things. And she was mine to take care of for just a little longer

As tragic as the moments are that you've just described, I find that they are important road marks in the maps of our hearts.

[Bear]

my oh my... this is riviting! Pain, love, tragedy, as you act out your role in keeping in touch with the one, you used to know. What a write!!