Dispatch #7

Wish You Were Here

I crumbled when I saw this — tucked in a card from my cousin Christelle. Unbeknownst to me, she found it at our grandparents’ house a few weeks ago while going through old photos. I’d been looking for one like this among my own, one that showed how Dad’s big arms always felt like comfort made manifest.

Sometimes I have dreams of Dad dying in ways other than how he actually died. Death by a different cancer. Death by a shot to the head. I walk with him to a last round of chemo or hold him as he bleeds, always helpless to change the outcome.

In the days following his death, it was that helplessness that haunted me most. In my memory of it, I’m outside my own body, watching myself wear a sterile gown and mask and gloves as I watch him from the edge of his hospital bed.

It’s only in the memories where I’m touching him that I can see him from my own perspective. Like when he reached for my hand as I was about to step outside the room for a moment. “I’ll be back really soon,” I said. He couldn’t talk, but he nodded.

When I returned, he’d been medicated to the point of unconsciousness. That moment I’d last been in the room turned out to be the last time he was ever aware of my presence. Or rather, it was the last time I knew with any certainty that he was aware of it.

In the days that followed, I hoped that my voice and my touch were slipping through. I grasped his arms — so weak and thin, their skin like paper — and began to steel myself for the absence of their embrace.