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Racing Barge by RonaldCoulter

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Memory One

I don’t remember what was playing on the television at the time. I don’t remember what we were watching. Maybe it was Person of Interest, a show we would eagerly follow together every week. Perhaps it was the news, our daily window into the happenings of the universe and the lives outside the bubble we call our own. Or, nothing of actual interest was playing on the television; quite possibly, television provided enough reason for boy and father to spend time together – and, enough noise to drown out the desire to dive into discussion about the futureless beyond.

Maybe it was the natural state of restlessness of a 15 year old boy that couldn’t keep me sitting down for long. Perhaps it was my desire to immerse myself in a video game, a coping mechanism developed to escape from the harsh realities posed by what they call “real life”. Or, the countless hours spent in body and soul together in silence with a dark, brooding cloud overshadowing the room in unending persistence held me away from much-needed time alone to process the emotions that toiled against the walls of my min – like waves, pounding against the foot-thick steel walls of a small but sturdy boat in the middle of a calmly raging sea, resisting nature’s pulling urge to capsize this small vessel with a spectacular will to survive.

I turn my head to face his. My eyes land on the top of his head. A head full of hair, split down the middle. Grey hairs invade the black forest, a prophet of doom that accompanies age. Or, the grey indicates the wealth of memories and stories, both unique and shared, experienced by the wonderful mind carried by the suit of armor upon which the grey strands sit. Perhaps the beauty of the fleetingness of life is found in the intricacies of complex emotion, joy and sorrow, love and hatred, comfort and outrage, and peace and violence, that are discovered when finding one’s way through the tightly-woven fabric of life. Funny thing experience is.

My gaze falls upon my father’s eyes. Eyes filled with years of wisdom and pain. Eyes that have seen infinitely more than my own, but may soon cease to see more than nothing at all. They stare at television, occasionally darting back and forth, up and down, following the false mental stimulus offering an escape from what we call “real life”.  

“Papa.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to play some games now. I’ll be back soon.”

“Okay, enjoy.”

I leave our room and the dark, brooding cloud overshadowing the room in unending persistence, looking forward to spending the next few group of sixty minutes alone in front of a computer. Funny how we can so willingly turn our attention away from one screen to another, with the only difference being who sits beside us, if anyone.

I think back to this moment with regret. Time is never guaranteed – nothing is. It is only the learning experience following what we do with the time the universe so generously gives us that is guaranteed. And while I was only a young, teenage boy seeking temporary respite in a complicated time, I was also a boy who did not fully appreciate the little time the universe so kindly loaned. Why did I leave him? How could I not? I needed my time alone. But time alone would follow in such vast amounts regardless. Could I not have stayed for a couple extra minutes? Would I have driven myself mad? I think back to this memory with lovingkindness and regret. I fucking love this memory with my father, and I fucking hate it as well.

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Synthetic Sunset 89

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Memory Two

The bell rings, signifying the day’s end of my normal, make-believe life. My friends – if you can even call them that, given they know absolutely nothing more than an ant would grasp the vastness of the valleys of the Grand Canyon – happily skip home on their school busses, one backpack strap over their shoulder. I loved my friends, but were they really my friends if I couldn’t muster up the courage to share my story and feelings with them? At that point, were they my friends? Or were they friends to the person I was during the day? Or perhaps, by not being true to self, I was the traitor, the pretender, the bearer of a false veneer of a friend.

In this recollection of a 15 year-old boy, the first half of his life ends to the ringing of the bell, signifying the beginning of the second half of his life. The walk to the hospital was a short fifteen-minute one; backpack on back and head to the ground, the walk often felt like an eternity spent in a room filled with the noxious gas of love-fuelled dread. It was impossible to separate feelings of sanguinity from afflictions of approaching temporal decay.

The hospital is a temple of love, loneliness, recovery, and death. Inside the building, my attention is divided between humans on different walks in life. Renewal and newfound hope can be discovered in the eyes of those lucky enough to leave the hospital stronger than before. Acceptance and grace, even, sometimes present in the eyes of those that do not share the same luck. For others, anger, regret, and resentment radiate into the air, like a foul gas leaking from a pipeline. We can sense the danger now – but it is too late. And as for the rest of the souls that happen to find themselves wandering around the hospital within whom acceptance, renewal, hope, regret, grace, nor anger can be found, a void exists between their eyes and their souls. You can only begin to speculate the afflictions that perturb their mind – during which find yourself being drawn into the same void that hides within them what you seek.

The boy enters his father’s room. Gray light impregnates space surrounded by four gray walls. On one gray wall, a television set rests mounted above a gray sofa. Atop the grey bed the father rests, half-reclined. There is little colour remaining in his face, almost as though the gray room siphoned colour from his body through contact with the gray bed.

“Hi, boy.”

“Hi papa.”

“How was your day?”

“Good.”

I don’t ask him how his day was, because I already knew how it was. Humiliating. Helpless. Harrowing. And to me, it was heartbreaking.

I ask if he wants to watch Person of Interest, and he nods. So we put it on and we watch it.

At times like this, there were no clear indications of how the boy was supposed or expected to feel towards himself or for his father. His eyes rested on his father’s face – or rather, the thin, skeletal frame of what used to hold the features containing all of the world’s lovingkindness in one man. His head lacked hair. His eyebrows were sparse; any individual eyebrow hair still clinging on had its colored drained to gray. His eyes, sunken. Devoid of hope for his own future. And yet, when those sunken eyes lay their gaze on me, they fill with a different kind of hope. The selfless kind of hope, one that wishes the best for someone not themselves. The kind of hope fuelled by love and encouragement, one that revitalizes his bank of faith, optimism, and assurance. Amidst the melancholy that haunted every day of our lives in the past nine months, those were the moments I lived for: Fleeting reminders, inspired by unconditional love, that my father was proud of who I have become. Consolation that everything will be okay, even past the toughest hurdles conjured by “real life”.

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Rest all is a lie...

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Memory Three

The day I am about to describe is as clear to me as my emotions were foggy. The morning of Christmas Eve, mother and I receive a worrying call leading to our arrival at the hospice. The call wasn’t surprising – it almost came as a relief – but a familiar feeling of dread accompanied the ringtone early in the morning.

Just the day before, as hospital staff were wheeling father, still in his bed, out of his room to transport him to the hospice, father was awake and lucid. Energetic, even. He had pointed his left index finger at me and a smile formed on his lips. Confidence and love filled his eyes as the wrinkles around his eyes creased under the familiar sensation of years of laughs and smiles. “That’s my boy,” he said. “I’m proud of my boy.” His proclamation of pride was uplifting and sad, for it would be the last time I would hear praise from him.

He was surrounded by family and friends in the hospice room. Unconscious and struggling to breath, his appearance pained those who cared deeply about him. Father laid in bed as an empty, fragile shell of his former self. The skin on his face clung tightly to the bone underneath; eyelids closed and lips ajar, this ashy, colorless skin existed as the only distinction between a human face and a human skull. His shoulder bones protruded from his shoulders like undersized pauldrons. His arms, lined with veins the colour of a dark stormy sea, appeared frail and decrepit. Once a human with a spirit of a lion, my father was now merely an exhibit in a glass museum – one you would approach with caution, under fear of shattering with the slightest brush of your hand.

I remember being seated next to his bed, closer to him than anyone else in the room. My mother stood on the other side of the bed. We would exchange glances. I could feel the expectation of incoming loss in her eyes from across the room. I’m sure everyone else in the room could feel the same energy radiating from either of us.

I was conflicted. I felt vulnerable. I hated feeling vulnerable. Surrounded by members of family and friends, I felt alone. I wanted to tell my father many things. I wanted to whisper in his ears that I loved him. That I appreciated the years of his life he had given up as an ultimate act of sacrifice for me. That mother and I will be okay, and I will take care of mother. That he can rest well and that I will see him again, one day, in the not-so-far future. There were a million more words I wanted to say, and I wanted a million more hours with him to deliver those words. I wanted him to rest peacefully knowing full well we would be okay.

I didn’t say shit. Surrounded by people, toxic masculinity prevented me from expressing my love and despair. I sat stoically. I was determined to be “strong” for my mother and for others. Out of a misguided and selfish desire to pretend to be someone I was not, I had built up a wall around myself that only ended up hurting my mother and father. I didn’t say anything to him that day.

At one-thirty in the afternoon, my father drew his last breath.

“I think he’s dead,” I announce to the room. It seemed as though I was the only one that noticed. I left to grab a caretaker.

A familiar feeling of sadness and relief washed over me. This moment marked the end of my childhood. It marked the end of nine difficult months of intense trepidation. It marked the end of my father’s life. It marked the beginning of a new life for me and my mother.

I only think back to this memory now with shame and regret. My inability to express myself due to fear of judgement disgusts me. Having shared this story with you now, tell me; how do you feel? How should I feel?