I hadn’t seen my dad in a year or more, although there had been photos from siblings and periodic phone calls tracing his growing inability to connect with the world around him. When I walked into his room, I was struck by how much he looked like my grandmother in the days before she died: sallow cheeks and mouth slightly agape, as if the soul were haunting the body rather than inhabiting it fully. His mien didn’t change much when I entered the room, but I know he heard my voice because he looked distantly in my direction with the subtlest, slightest upward movement of the corners of his mouth.

I knelt down beside his bed—the guards up on either side to safeguard him from rolling out—and I took his hand, which was slight and crooked and remarkably soft. His skin sat directly on bone. It was as if the flesh (pulp?) of his life had waned in the three years since his decline took hold and held him captive in a body that no longer obeyed him and a mind that wandered untethered to space or time. He returned intermittently to the world in which we operate, evinced by moments in which he appeared to pop through the surface like a fishing bobber and then, equally without warning, return to the depths below. He might make eye contact, or share a smile or a facial expression that seemed especially relevant to a time-connected happening in his presence, and then, before the happening could bear any more fruit, the line was cut, and the catch released.

I spent three consecutive days like this with him, holding his hand, caressing his head, listening intently to his breath and the subtle remains of the constancy of his life. At the end of the third day, I squeezed his hand for the last time, stood up, and bent over to give him a long, lingering kiss on his forehead. I whispered from my deepest self that I loved him, that I loved him so very much. I told him how sorry I was for all the time when I had been childish, cruel, withholding, unloving. I told him how much I regretted the precious moments wasted on petty and trivial aggravations. I apologized for ever having loved him any less than I did in that exact moment, which was enormously.

And then I turned away and left the room. He was already asleep and didn’t see that I had left, but I knew that he knew. I knew that he knew I had been there. I knew that he knew that I had always been there, even and especially at the times when I wasn’t there. And our presences met in that moment, mine bound for persisting and his for ceasing. As they crossed paths, they brushed against one another, and all that had been unspoken was acknowledged and understood. All was forgiven. All was right between us. And each of us would pass through our respective doors, never to meet again, and always to remain connected.

Published January 5, 2014