Brown Linoleum

I’m sweating like a pig. Damn dogs. Can’t eat like civilized creatures, they have to eat like goddamn wild animals.  I mop up the crusted gunk from the floor and then straighten to stretch my back.  I glance out the kitchen window and notice the dog nose prints and kid fingerprints coating the glass.  Sigh.  I return the mop to its hook in the closet and grab the Windex.  Taking a moment to cool down, I fan my shirt to dry the sweat. Flap, flap, flap.  A moment later I get to work on the window and notice a fog taking residence in the tree line.  It is thick, like the yellow mucus that my father coughed up while he was dying.

It was only a few years ago that I sat in the hospital, not knowing what to say or do. So I did nothing.  I sat there by him and did absolutely nothing.  Said nothing.  He stared at me.  Frequently his eyes were blank, but at times they shone bright with awareness.  He’d groan and I would hold his hand.  Then he would sigh.  How can someone I hated from the pit of my soul make me want to just crumble and sob?  He ruined my new jeans when his body convulsed as his lungs tried to rid themselves of the sick slime and clotted blood. The mottled crud soon turned a solid red color and the texture went to a thin liquid that would spray across the room as he hacked and choked and gagged.  I begged the doctor to up his morphine. 

“He’s at the limit that I can give him.  If we give him anymore, it could shut his body down.  Do you understand what that means?” he asked me.   Yep.  I’m asking you to kill my father.  Make it quick, won’t you?  It’s not about ending his pain, really.  It’s about ending mine. He’s only got a day or so anyways.  Please.  Let me go.  I just want to go. 

But I stayed.  I counted the tiles on the floor of his room and watched my grandmother toss and turn on the pull out sofa.  I slept in the chair by his bed. One time I woke to find his eyes boring a hole straight through me.  As if he was trying to grab tight to this opportunity to actually see me.  His last chance.  Somehow change a lifetime of wrongs into one moment of right with only his eyes to get the job done. His voice had left him by that point.  The chaplain came in that morning and said, “now might be the time to say anything you have been wanting to say.  To tell him anything you feel you need to…”. I sat silently, the chaplain quiet as well.  What the hell do you want me to say, I thought. 

FUCK YOU!  That’s all I really wanted to say.  FUCK YOU for making me feel like I was a piece of shit, not worth anything.  Did you know that I compared my mother’s boyfriends to the yardstick of you?  They were doomed from the start to never get my approval. FUCK YOU for sending me a letter from prison telling me not to be ashamed of you.  After all, Thomas Jefferson grew marijuana too, you said.  FUCK YOU for this and that and the other thing, too. And FUCK YOU most of all for blaming all your mistakes and failings on my mother.  The same mother that never said a bad word about you.  That made excuses for you.  That tried to tell me that you really did love me, as I cried when you forgot my birthday again. The mother that taught me forgiveness and compassion.  SHE was the reason I was even there.  She was the reason that I had decided to be here with you.  To honor your request for my presence.  To let you have some comfort in your final days.  To think that I had forgiven you.  But I never will.

I said nothing.  I sat and stared at the floor, following the cracks in the worn, brown linoleum.