Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [129]
Meantime, I stayed seated next to my father’s bed. He tried carrying on a conversation, but I could tell he was distracted. He kept studying the door, waiting for my mother to come back.
After a few minutes, my mother returned.
“What did the doctor say to you, Bessie?” my father asked.
“Oh, not much, Frank. He just told me that he thought I should stay around for a few days, to give you a hand when you got back to your place. He’s afraid you might try to push yourself a little too hard after the surgery.”
My father seemed relieved by my mother’s words, and we talked for a while longer. My father told us a few of his corny jokes and we laughed at all of them. Then my mother said it was time for her and me to start back home. “You know I don’t like to be out too late,” she said, and leaned over to kiss my father on the forehead. It was then, in the awful, dark look that briefly crossed her face, that I saw what was coming.
As soon as my mother and I hit the lobby of the hospital, she sank into a chair. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Your father’s going to die. He has a form of cancer, and the doctors can’t cure it. We’ll only have him for a few more months.”
I try to remember, as honestly or vividly as I can, how I felt in the moments after I heard this. I know that I remained calm. I did not feel scared, I did not feel panic, I did not cry. I did, however, feel terribly sorry for what my mother was going through. For a few moments, it seemed as if she might not be able to survive this knowledge herself. Beyond that, I think my first thought was that I would be more alone now, but that would be okay. I had already learned how to live with a certain detachment from much of the world around me, and I had already come to accept my distance from my brothers. But about the actual knowledge that my father was now dying—I don’t remember feeling grief or anguish. In fact, I think I felt a certain relief for him. Over the years, in the times when he and I lived together, I had sometimes found him sitting alone, his head lowered to his desk as he pounded his fist on the tabletop and said, over and over: “I wish I was dead.” I think, in truth, he feared death, but I also think that life was a constant trial for him. Soon, all those trials would be over.
In any event, I knew that my life was now changing. I would be on my own. I felt ready for it, for some reason. If my father taught me anything, that was probably his greatest lesson: how to live alone in this world.
That night, I went next door to visit our friends. My mother had already called them and given them the news. Walt, the man who was probably my half brother, was sitting at the dining table with a glass of whiskey in his hands. I could tell from his reddened eyes that he had been crying for a long time.
THAT SAME NIGHT MY MOTHER called our home back in Milwaukie. Gary was the only one there when she called. She gave him the news. She told him that under no circumstances was anybody to let on to my father that he was dying. She thought he had the right to die without fear and worry. This didn’t seem right to me; I thought my father had the right to know that he was dying. I thought nobody should have to enter death without the chance to make peace for his soul. My brother Frank agreed with me on this issue, but it didn’t matter. My mother was firm: My father would not know he was going to die.
My brother Frank had not been there when my mother called because he had taken a job down the street at a nearby car wash. That night, when he came home, the house was dark. He went up to his room, lay down on his bed, and turned on his small black-and-white