One Last Song
Word Count: 1,945
Every time I hear that song on the radio, I think of death. I wasn’t ready for it when it came. I suppose in retrospect no one ever is. Even when I knew it would happen soon, I chose to ignore it until it refused to be ignored any longer. That is how the process begins, after all. First we deny it, then we struggle with it, and finally we accept it. And it is with great regret that we watch the best things in our lives slip through our fingers before we even knew they were there.
I came from a decent family. A loving family. There was my mom, always strong and nurturing, good at being a mom and good at her job. Dad, always personable, funny and intelligent. He was the person who got me into music, the man I shared my early singing experiences with, and the guy who could fix just about anything. My older brother, Brian, who was the biggest dork on the face of the planet, but I loved him anyway. And then there was me. The baby of the family, I had just graduated high school when it happened.
“We have bad news,” my father announced after sitting my brother and I down on the couch in our newly constructed log home. Now he looked serious. Gravely serious. And it made my stomach jump into my throat. “I have cancer.”
Whatever I had been expecting, it had not been this. I couldn’t formulate any words to say, so I just sat there, silently trying to register the gravity of the situation.
“Is it treatable?” my brother asked, leaning forward to stare at my father.
“We’re going to try,” Dad responded. “They found cancerous cells in the lump on my hip, and a mass in my shoulder and chest. They’re going to treat it like Lung Cancer.”
“Wow,” was all I said in response. Mom looked like she wanted to pelt from the room and break down but was too weary to do so.
But Dad had a look of determination on his face that I was proud of. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get rid of this. I’ll lick the a*****e of a skunk if I have to.”
That lightened the mood. Despite the somber atmosphere we all laughed, if only a little. For a while life proceeded like it normally did, but we were all dead a little inside, as if a part of us had already given up hope.
~*~
I had just started my first semester at the community college. Dad had just started Chemo. Mom was taking it hard, and Dad was trying to act the hero, joking around as usual and trying to make it seem like he wasn’t suffering. Sometimes he would complain about the pain in his shoulder. More often, the pain in his hip. The doctors had determined that they couldn’t remove the hip mass because it was buried too deep within the muscles. The shoulder was a maybe. The chest? Well, they were going to try and zap that.
We had also found out that my grandma on Dad’s side had Lung Cancer. Funny how that happens. Our family seemed like it was starting to fray at the edges.
~*~
Christmas came. Dad had lost most of his hair from the treatments. He was having a hard time walking; the cancer had sunk into his bones and was eating away at the marrow in his legs, leaving them brittle, and him mostly bed-ridden. I bought him a travel mug. I thought that by giving him that mug I was giving him the promise of freedom and travel; of hope. I was giving him the gift of getting better. He smiled at my gift, but it was a sad one; resigned. He knew, and we did too. We just didn’t want to admit it.
~*~
Spring came, and with spring Dad’s forty-ninth birthday. We threw a big party at our house, and we knew that it was going to be his last one. He was losing his ability to speak, although he could still comprehend what everyone said to him. We took him out on the front porch so he could be outside. We told him we loved him often. He really seemed to like that. I wanted to cry.
By now we had a nurse who came by every couple of days to check up on him and make sure we were doing all right. Well, we weren’t doing all right; my aunts were fighting over treatment methods, my mom was stuck in the middle of it and it only made the whole ordeal worse for her. Grandma was dying. Dad had begun hallucinating, but we didn’t know if it was because of his drugs or the fact that the cancer had moved to his brain. Regardless, we knew bad things were not far off, and a heavy sense of dread crept through our household.
~*~
I was taking a summer math class in order to be accepted at my university of choice after first being denied. I kept finding it hard to concentrate. My friends helped me through my homework a lot because I couldn’t think straight.
On June 11th, my grandmother died. My father was unable to attend the funeral; he was so far gone that he couldn’t control his bodily functions anymore. When we came back, we assured Dad that his mom was in Heaven. He seemed to understand. We held his hands for a long time while he lay on the hospital bed in our living room.
The morning before my final math exam I was heading out the door when my cousin called me back inside. “You’d better come back,” he said. “We think he’s going to go.” So back in I went. We called everyone we could manage, and they all came to bid him farewell. We all took turns stroking his withered brow and telling him it was okay to go. I gave him a kiss on the forehead and told him I loved him.
He mouthed that he loved me too, and I stepped away from his bed, unable to control my tears any longer. After everyone had taken their turn he shuddered and breathed his last. And we, his family, his next of kin, formed a circle around his bed and sang “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.” Our voices trembled with grief.
~*~
“I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
When those words came out of the priest’s mouth, there was not a dry eye in the sanctuary. His funeral was beautiful. Instead of mourning his loss, we had decided to celebrate his life. We chose up-beat songs that he and I had always sung in church. I even sang with the choir for one song. It was a powerful service. I believed in God; truly believed that my father had found a place among the angels. And as the song we had chosen for him was sung I thought back on the parts of his life that I knew, and how much regret I felt that I couldn’t have had a little more time with him.
“When I think back on these times And the dreams we left behind I’ll be glad ‘cause I was blessed to get, To have you in my life. When I look back on these days, I look and see your face; You were right there for me.”
I thought about all the times my father had bailed me out of trouble, all the times he’d turned my sour moods around with his silly optimism. How he was the only man at his workplace that they had called on to deal with the stubborn people, simply because he could relate to anyone.
“In my dreams I’ll always see you soar above the sky; In my heart will always be a place for you, for all my life. I’ll keep a part of you with me, And everywhere I am, there you’ll be… And everywhere I am, there you’ll be.”
I envisioned him singing in the heavenly choir; tenor, as he always had been. Or maybe he’d be strumming his twelve string acoustic guitar while singing angelic campfire songs and roasting cloud-colored marshmallows.
“Well you showed me how it feels To feel the sky within my reach, And I always will remember All the strength you gave to me. Your love made me make it through; Oh, I owe so much to you. You were right there for me.”
I remembered Dad telling me never to start a fight. He was really the perfect role-model for it; the only fights he ever started were tickle-fights. I smiled, even as the tears streamed down my face. As I looked across the sanctuary I wondered how the choir was going to sing for the rest of the service; they were all bawling.
“In my dreams I’ll always see you soar above the sky; In my heart will always be a place for you, for all my life. I’ll keep a part of you with me, And everywhere I am, there you’ll be… And everywhere I am, there you’ll be.”
I could feel his presence, even though his body lay lifeless in the casket at the front of the church. And despite the long journey he’d made and the torture he’d endured, I found myself wishing that the casket would open back up again and he’d sit up and crack a joke. I felt utterly helpless, like a child trying to solve an impossible calculus equation.
“‘Cause I always saw in you my light, my strength, And I want to thank you now for all the ways You were right there for me… You were right there for me, Always.”
I hoped Dad had finally found happiness, although I knew his happiness would never be so profound as when he was spending time with his family. Because to him, family had been the most important thing in the world. And he had been the most important thing in my world. I found myself relating to the song and saying a silent “thank you” to him for raising me right. His face swam in the darkness when I closed my eyes, smiling as he always had. It was going to be very hard to cope with this loss.
“In my dreams I’ll always see you soar above the sky; In my heart will always be a place for you, for all my life. I’ll keep a part of you with me, And everywhere I am, there you’ll be… And everywhere I am, there you’ll be.”
He was laid in the ground just a scant hour later, and when we walked away from the burial site I looked up and saw clouds in the shape of two angels lifting a man. And for all that the image made me sad, it was like the silver lining on a dark cloud. Just Dad’s way of showing us that he’d found his way to Heaven at last.
Every time I hear that song on the radio, I think of death. I wasn’t ready for it when it came. I’m still not prepared for it. But I know now that someone up there is looking down on me wherever I go, smiling and guiding me along my life path. And I find myself thanking him more and more every day.
Alanora Calaran · Mon Jan 11, 2010 @ 07:41pm · 0 Comments |