Strawberries
My father can’t stop thinking about his car spinning in circles. I can’t stop thinking about the strawberries.
The nurse tells him that he can press the button on his IV drip for the oxycodone. But he’s never forgotten all the ordinary people from his days as a parole officer. All the people whose addiction turned them first into zombies, and then into thieves. My father closes his eyes and clenches his teeth each time the wave of pain washes over him.
“I’m so scared,” he says.
He is covered in bruises so red, and so complete, that his normal skin tone is now an exception that serves as witness to a before. Before I let his call go to voicemail while I continued cutting strawberries for my four-year-old daughter. Before the speeding car raced through a red light and sent him careening toward a divider on a Long Island road. Before I became sure that had I answered the phone, his trip to the bank would have been delayed long enough to avoid all of this.
“I thought I would never stop spinning,” my father says.
I kiss his forehead. It’s been a decade, maybe more, since we’ve spent this much time together. There was no big fight, just a slow drift from each other that one day felt like a canyon between us.
But in this hospital room, with its beeping machines and the mashed potatoes that my father will not touch, a fog lifts enough for me to see him, to notice for the first time the contours of someone other than “my dad.”
He’s worn down to an essence. His humanity is everywhere. For a moment that is as soft as a whisper. I think that this is a gift.
We are holding hands when he says, “Thank you for coming.”
Brad Snyder’s nonfiction work has appeared in HuffPost Personal, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and elsewhere. He is pursuing his MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Bay Path University. You can find more of his work at bradmsnyder.com or follow him on Instagram @bradmsnyderwriting.
