At the corner of Harding Avenue and 4th street we had been gathering.
To some degree the events had become routine. Routine to me had become a hassle. Routine to others had hardened into a way of life.
Then eventually the last call required paperwork, awkwardness, quietness and now a perpetual “elephant in the room”.
It’s interesting how after some time in a hospital you become aware of it’s practical floor plan and memorize it’s efficiently laid out bland hallways. The decor is certainly “clinical” but after spending time in a place you recognize the flaws in the space. I am talking about the water fountain spout sporting a significant shade of rust or the wax like floors whose tile patterns take you back to the early 1950s in America.
Hospitals are also noisy places. Polite but unmistakably loud with every room venting out a constant chime or groan or need or cry. Passersby pretend not to notice but the human ear is attune to recognize the sounds of ailment and the cavernous passageways of these places are perfect amplifiers to our ears.
It is with this sensitivity that I coaxed myself into a room on some level of this hospital and saw the near sunken eyes of my father just a bit more than a decade ago.
There are so many other prolific writers who have described men like my father. Perhaps its telling that I chose the words of others to delineate how I saw him. He was a poet, self made man, adulterer, traveler, fashionista, wife beater and hustler that so many have lauded. I knew him for less than a quarter of his life and he’s become a looming myth that’s hard to shake.
I opine that he inherited his four children (two of them which I call sisters) a sense of defiance, a need for attention and a raw humanity that we hope to not pass on to the next set of tykes.
But it is perhaps these qualities that eventually led to one signature on a winter day.
My father was driven to Beverly Hospital in Montebello, Ca after years of battling the strains of diabetes. We had not spoken in some time and though my mother had begun asking for aid a few months prior, there was still a lot of tension between us all. It took a lot of coaxing to want to engage and when I did it became an exercise in duty.
On the day it occurred I recall near perfect blue skies overhead as I walked into the white edifice. It wasn’t a looming fortress but instead a ho-hum building surrounded by average houses that hosted the life and drama of families with unknowing energy.
My fiancee walked with me. The pace we held together was reassuring and normal. We had walked it together before and would share it again in the future over other pressing matters that begged our attention and stressed our bond. I remember feeling resolved.
Upon arriving at the room I panned over a living human mummy. My father was covered in near white hospital sheets whose silkiness clung to the emaciated body he had become. The wear and tear of the condition had eaten away at his body and now before rested a husk of the thick powerful man I once feared.
His breathing was beyond shallow. He wore a plastic sheath about his face that pumped air into his torso. To me, the only recognizable characteristic was the thickness of his hair that grew in defiance of creeping death that would come in minutes time.
I whispered to him. What I said is private. It is between him and I. Dialog that belongs to fathers and sons who decide in glances what their legacy together will be. I then called to the Social Worker, signed a form and made sure the carbon paper caught my impression and went to the bathroom.
When I came back. My face was nearly dry and my eyes were still bloodshot. A man I once call “papa” was a corpse in the room.
To this day, I’ve been to his grave site once. On the day we buried him.
