Tock

We sing a lot to him. The nurses don't mind; not in this ward. We sing the old songs, the ones we grew up with. The ones we remember dancing to with him after Havdala every motzeh Shabbas. I say tehilim and daven slowly, carefully, because there is no rush. I have no where to go other than this room.

This time that I have with him is an unexpected treasure, one last gift from him. So I tell him everything. I tell him about my hopes for the future. I tell him about my plans for now. I tell him about my pitfalls,how my selfishness gets in the way of me being who I want to be and how I want to be more like him and my mother.

People come and go, speaking in hushed whispers. My family is loud and we laugh a lot. Some visitors do not know what to make of this, the laughing vigil, and honestly, I don't know what to make of it. It has been one of the strangest weeks of my life. His eyes look lifeless, but his soul is here, right? We are sad, but remember when...? ends in ringing laughter.

He is here. He is not here. I want him to live forever. I want him to go, it's just too much pain in a lifetime of pain. The vaccant eyes,so dry from being open for days at a time, the mouth a hole where his smile used to be, and the feeling that he hears every word I am saying...

I call my daughters, ask them about their day. They sound so mature on the phone. They ask for presents. I promise presents. I am 6,00 miles away from them promising gifts and love and then hanging up on my children while I am walking the streets of New York arm in arm with my sisters waiting for my father to die.

Tick

The day did not pass in a blur. It passed slowly, slowly, a microscosm of his illness of the past 24 years. I got the phone call, crumpled. But then the flight was not until one in the morning, and it was only three in the afternoon. I sat down, had a cup of water. It squirmed it my belly for a while. Then I packed, cleaned up from lunch, cleaned up from not lunch, did laundry, did more laundry, did more laundry than was neccessary, rearranged the toys, sponga-ed the apartment, sponga-ed the hallway outside the aprtment, sponga-ed the steps in the building, took out the garbage.

Time passed slowly, slowly, and I had tea and a few crackers. The baby squirmed and wiggled and cried the whole flight, and I had this wierd resentment of him, of Outdoorsman, of everyone on the flight who was not my mother. Which was everyone. We landed and we inched along in the painfully slow traffic.

My mother called.

"He's still here, D." she said.

"oh--"

"He's waiting for you."

But he was not waiting for me. Or at least, he was not only waiting for me. Because I hugged him and kissed him and cried and told him I was here and I love him. His mouth gaped, bloodied and sore. His eyes were opened, glazed and unseeing. Or maybe seeing everything.

But still, he waited. Still, he is waiting. For everyone to be there? For no one to be there?

He shouldn't be here, the doctor says. No one can live with failed kidneys and their lungs filling with blood. He is brain dead, he said. He had two cardiac arrests and is bleeding out from everywhere. He is not really breathing, the machine is.

Don't unplug him, came the startling answer from the rav. Do everything you can to keep him alive.

Is he alive? I know his neshama is here, hovering over his bed. Hovering over us all. I keep feeling like he is going to turn to me while I am whispering in his ear and say, boo!

But he won't. So we wait. And wait. While I write slow Frank O'Hara poetry in my head and keep taking showers.