There was ghoulishness at the hospital at night. When the footfalls fell away and the lights along the corridors seemed to scream louder than the screeching silence. Doctors emerged from doorways peering at clipboards in their hands. Occasionally an orderly pushed a stretcher by, looking half asleep. I wandered through these corridors searching for something, a meaning to the life of my father who was dying in his small room, and a meaning to my life which was falling apart. I was only 25 but felt like I had lived two different lives.
I sat outside the beautiful little chapel at Mater Hospital and sipped from my bottle of Coke which had alcohol. It offered me a weird kind of comfort, one that I recognised for its fleeting warmth of the moment. I stared at the architecture of the chapel and thought about God and all His children with sickness in them, lying in various beds waiting to heal or to die. It almost felt like He was waiting too like everybody else. I wondered how many had come here to seek God’s intervention on something that had already been ordained.
I thought about our bodies and how useless they were. Look at my father, a man who had been a bastion of health, an impregnable fortress, a towering figure, his voice able to fold rooms in two. Now a man on his back, small in his final bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to lift a glass of water. How our bodies betray us. How completely deceptive health is.
It was my turn to watch over my dad that night and that usually meant sleeping over. (Sitting over, was more like it). He was in a private room that smelled of the flowers that were dying. Everything seemed to be dying around him. Just the previous day, the television in his room wouldn’t come on. I fiddled with its power button. “Leave it.” my dad croaked, his voice dry as a bone. “It’s dead.
This particular evening he was in a daze of painkillers while fighting infections. He had bedsores that I could smell if I sat very close to him. When he slept, I sat staring at his helpless face wondering what his face looked like as a child. He slipped in and out of consciousness. When his eyes fluttered open, they’d turn in his head, looking around in panic. He’d then reach for my hand desperately, “Mama, they want to sell me.” He called me ‘Mama’, after his mother, so I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or his mother. I wasn’t sure of anything at all, to be honest. He’d say unintelligible things, things that seemed insane to the living but might have been real in his realm, this transition to the other life. Or whatever the f*ck we go when we die. I was heartbroken to see him like this. I was also scared.
I didn’t mind him saying these things when it was only me and him in the room. I could live with that. But when my friends were around, I was mortified. I wanted to hide in shame. I’d avoid their eyes when he rambled on about these things, these people who were trying to sell him. I’d then flee the room and go cry in one of my friend’s cars.
I wished he would die.
I can tell you one thing here with great certainty before you finish gasping at that; I probably loved my father more than you could ever love yours. I adored him. I admired him. I liked him. He was a fearless man. He was curious. He loved music. He worked hard. When I was sinking from the bad choices I had made, he was the only one who never let go of my hand.
Now I wanted him dead.
I was tired of seeing him this way. Seeing him turn into this man I didn’t know. I didn’t want him to leave me with a different image of him, this vulnerable man, scared maybe and who no longer had a handle on things. I wanted to remember him as my greatest and highest pillar, my hero who always came to my rescue. I was scared that he was leaving me, scared that I would have nobody else who could love me like he did. Mostly, I was selfish. I was sick of walking into that hospital and seeing him in that state.
At around midnight, I threw my empty bottle of Coke in the trash and strolled back to his room. He was unconscious. I sat in the chair next to him and stared at the veins behind his hand. I recognised those veins, I knew the blood that ran in them. When he stirred awake he started groaning. I stood up and said, “I’m here, Dad.” He touched my hand. His touch, although warm, felt emotionless, devoid of recognition, like touching a doorknob that someone else had just touched. He pulled my hand and urged me to say hello to his father. My grandfather had been dead for years.
It broke my heart. I started to cry. I tried to make him go back to sleep. I pulled the cover up to his chin. I wiped the tears with the back of my hand and tried to look strong and reassuring. “Why don’t you want to speak to my father?” he asked over and over again. I said, “He’s not here, dad. Your father isn’t here. It’s just you and me.”
He then asked, “Am I making you tired? Do you want me to go?”
And I said Yes.
I did, I told my dad that he could die.
His face just turned soft with hurt and he started crying. I’d never seen my dad cry. Never. He was a lion. He was tall with wide shoulders and a sturdy personality. No challenge he wouldn’t rise to. People feared my father. He was mercurial. My dad walked around with a lion’s hair in his pocket. A real lion’s hair. (Another story, another day). If anyone could get a lion’s hair it was my father. It was meant to inspire fear in everyone around him. He wasn’t one to cross. One time he hit a guy so hard that his left cheekbone sunk into his face. Nobody ever challenged him. He was alpha. Now the alpha was crying. I did something nobody else had done to him; make him cry.
I didn’t feel remorse seeing him cry, I got angry.
I don’t know why, but I did. I walked away, left him there in his tears, and I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. When I emerged from the bathroom he was asleep. I sat in the same chair I had sat in for many nights and days, waiting. I read a book; Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight. I was only reading it because my friends were reading it. I was tired of it, to be honest, tired of everything else. Tired of the hospital room. Of the nurses who came in with their trays bearing medicine and things. I was tired of this life of sitting here waiting for my father to be better or to die.
When the sun came up I couldn’t leave the hospital fast enough. I picked up my bag and quickly snuck out of the room before he could stir awake. I wanted to put a great distance between me and that hospital room. I wanted to run away from him and his impending doom. I was happy to go back to my life, which was full of doom itself, but at least I wasn’t obsessed with the idea of being sold or seeing dead people. I went to the gym but I was so tired. My tired was tired. I couldn’t run on the treadmill without grabbing at the side rails. I bench-pressed a few weights and sat staring at the floor. So I went home, opened a bottle of whisky and proceeded to drink myself into a stupor l in my gym clothes. It was the only way I could sleep. I blacked out on the sofa.
When I woke up the doorbell was ringing. It was Rhoda, my cleaning lady. I opened the door and went back to the sofa. She drew open the curtains, opened the windows, and cleaned around me like I was a log not to be moved. I eventually showered and drove back to the hospital.
When I walked into his ward, I found a woman lying there with an older lady holding a bottle of water while she sipped it through a straw. I looked around confused, as if they might have hidden my dad under the bed. I stepped back and confirmed the ward number.
“Where is the man who was in this room?” I addressed the older woman.
“What man?” she asked. The sick lady looked at me. Her eyes were as white as rice. If rice would stare at you it would look like that lady.
I left the door open and went to the nurses station where a plump nurse sipping tea from a big mug informed me that my dad’s condition had deteriorated in the night and had since been moved to ICU. My heart fell to my feet. In the ICU I found him plugged on beeping machines. A tube ran from under his nose. He couldn’t talk. He could only communicate by squeezing his hands. I wanted to say I was sorry about last night but the same squeeze to say hello was the same squeeze that I received when I apologised.
My dad died soon after.
He left me with an astounding amount of guilt. His death buried me under that guilt, that I haven’t come out. That in my moment of impatience, and anger, this man who would give up the world for me, in his greatest hour of need…I pushed him off the ledge. I told him I wanted him to die. And he died, thinking that I was tired of him. That I was a burden to him. Oh, that will never leave me.
~ As told to Biko by an anonymous reader.
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