The
Prisoner
By Donna Salas
It was a beautiful October afternoon in my small home town
of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. The weather was warm and inviting—as if fall had forgotten
to be cold and gloomy, had an identity crisis, and wanted to be spring for a
day. The trees had started their annual art crawl across the city, painting its
neighborhoods with splashes of red, gold, orange, and yellow. Even the trees
that had completely shed their leaves added a beautiful nakedness to the
landscape. The seasons were on the cusp of that beautiful blending that happens
as spring slides into fall. It was the time when the earth started to settle in
for a long, cold nap, and Mother Nature started to slow life down. It was on
this beautiful and perfect day that he decided to settle in, too. He couldn’t
have picked a more perfect day to die.
I woke up early in the small apartment in the basement of my
parents’ house. I showered quickly, threw on jeans and a t-shirt, and raced
upstairs. My mom stood in the kitchen, her back to me, making tortillas. The
smell filled my nostrils and woke my stomach, stirring it to growl. She turned
toward the stove to flip a tortilla. I could tell she had been awake for hours
already. “How’s he doing this morning?” I asked my mom as I kissed her cheek.
She looked tired and worn out. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail;
small frayed ends of hair framed her face and stood out like fragile wisps at
her temples.
“He had a rough night. Didn’t get much sleep,” she said and
turned back to the counter to start rolling another piece of masa. I poured
myself a cup of coffee and headed out of the kitchen toward his bedroom at the
front of the house. I suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore.
His light was on, and the door was open. His TV was on the
Spanish channel Telemundo, but the sound was turned down to a muted muffle. His
oxygen tank breathed in and out in a raspy hiss like an aggravated cat by his
bedside. The police scanner buzzed and beeped on the night stand; disembodied
voices broke through speaking in code every now and then. His eyes lit up when
I walked in the room.
“Good morning, Dad. How’d you sleep?”
He smiled and said in his most serious voice, “With my eyes
closed.”
We both giggled. This was a running joke we said every
morning to each other. I kissed his cheek and sat in the big red recliner at
the end of his bed.
We made small talk. How’s
work? How’s the truck running? (I had been having belt issues with my truck,
and he had walked me through changing the belts and setting the timing over the
phone.) We talked about everything except his illness. I didn’t ask how he was
feeling because I could see how he was feeling. I knew he was in pain every
waking second. His body had swelled to twice its normal size. He was an athletic
man of 5’9” and about 250 pounds. I remember thinking, “My daddy is the
toughest, strongest man alive. Nothing can defeat him.” I could have never in
my life believed that he’d be done in by a 12-ounce aluminum can of beer. Now
here he sat, his body so swollen that he couldn’t move or walk; he literally
could not lift the weight of his own leg. All he could move were his arms and
head.
We talked briefly about nothing special when I asked what
time it was. I had to leave for work soon. He told me I had about ten minutes until
I had to leave. He fell silent at those words. A melancholy fell on him, and he
suddenly looked so sad. I pretended not to notice; I refilled his coffee and
kissed his cheek. “OK, Dad, I gotta go. I love you, and I’ll see you after work.”
He looked straight ahead, a blank stare filling his eyes, and
said, “OK. I love you, too, mija.” He said these words to the nothingness
outside the bedroom window, not making eye contact with me. I knew deep in my
soul that something was wrong. He didn’t say “I’ll see you later” back.
I worked an uneventful eight-hour day. For some reason, I decided
not to call home at lunch like I normally did. I know now I was scared that I
would get bad news. I would call, and Mom would have to tell me that he had
taken a turn for the worse, and I should get home now! I had told my mom that if she needed to get a hold of me
during the day to call my boss’s office phone, and she would come get me. But as
my day progressed and Marilyn never came out of her office to get me, I began
to think my fears of that morning were just paranoia. Maybe I was overreacting.
3:30 p.m.—I had made it! I’d worked all day and had no word
from Mom. As I walked confidently through the parking lot toward my Toyota pickup,
I thought about stopping by the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread and
other odds and ends to get me through the week. I had my hand on the handle of
the truck door when Marilyn came running out of the building.
“Donna! Your mom just called. She said you need to get home now!” My stomach tightened, and my
throat closed. For a moment, I just stood there trying to process her words. It
was almost like they had been said to me in a foreign language that I knew only
the curse words to. The ten-minute drive home seemed to take an hour. I don’t
remember much about the drive, but I remember thinking, Please let it be something stupid, like, “Get home now! Your dog made a
mess in the basement.”
When I finally pulled in the drive, I noticed my Aunt
Cathy’s car parked in the street. Nothing unusual there—she would often come
and spend the whole day with my dad. My grandmother had moved in when dad got
sick, so my aunt would come over and visit her, too. My aunt and my dad were as
close as a brother and sister could be, and there was no place in the world she
would rather be than with her baby brother. They shared a birthday, and twelve
years later, just a week short of my dad, they also shared their final breath.
What was out of
place was Andrea’s old maroon Toyota Camry parked outside. Andrea was a good friend
of the family, and I’d known her my whole life. She was also a hospice nurse
and had been assigned to us when my dad was put on hospice two months ago. She
had been to the house only a few times during the day to help Mom bathe Dad in
his bed since he couldn’t get out of it and to change a dressing on his leg
when he came down with thrush. Most of the time, she was there was as a friend.
This was not good.
I ran into the house through the front door since that was
closest to his room. He was laying in his bed, his arms folded on his chest;
the fleece blanket Mom had made him a few years ago for Christmas covered his
bloated body. We had bought him a hospital bed a few weeks ago, and it took up
so much of the room that we had to put it in at an angle, covering up the
closet door. My aunt stood on his left, my grandmother was at the foot of the
bed, and my mom was standing on his right. I pushed my way into his cramped
room and took my mom’s place on his right. I took his hand; it felt cold and
still. I scanned the room looking from face to face and saw that everyone
looked worried. “I think it’s time, mija,” my mom said as she put her hand on
my shoulder.
“Did anybody call Adrian?” I asked, just then noticing that
my brother wasn’t there. He would be crushed if he couldn’t be there. He would
never forgive us! Looking back now, I know that a small part of me didn’t want
him there. I felt that if he wasn’t there, then Dad would not leave. It was a
childish wish. My aunt nodded and said he was on his way. Dad’s breathing was
so shallow it was almost non-existent. We stood watching him sleep, nobody
ready to cry just yet.
Adrian finally ran into the room and took up post on the
left side where Cathy had been standing. He took Dad’s other hand. We looked at
each other, and a quiet understanding passed between us. We both leaned in at
the same time and whispered in his ear, “It’s OK, Dad. You can go now. We’ll be
OK.” A silence fell over the room, like someone had sucked the air out of it
and we stood in a vacuum. A clock ticked somewhere, and the angry cat hissed in
and out on the nightstand. Then, like that, he was gone. We all just looked at each
other. Andrea came into the room and checked his pulse and looked for a
heartbeat. She shook her head and said he had gone home. And just like that, on
a beautiful fall day in October, my dad went to the clearing at the end of the
path.
The most profound heaviness fell on me, and I ran out to the
front porch and wailed. I cried like I had never cried before. The weight of my
grief fell on me like a 20-ton cement block, and I collapsed to the floor. I
felt paralyzed and numb from head to toe. My girlfriend scooped me into her
arms and carried me into the living room. People all around me were in
different stages of sorrow. My brother was in shock and just sat at the dining
room table. My mother and Aunt Cathy were holding my grandmother. I went to her
and hugged her. I began to cry again. I told her I was sorry that she had to
see this. I was sorry she had to watch another son die. No mother wants to see her
children suffer or feel sad, but deep down, all parents are selfish and hope to
pass away before their children. In the end, nobody wants to lose someone they
love and would do anything to not have to feel that pain.
Someone called hospice, someone called my Aunt Joanne, and
someone called the rest of the family. I had moved to the back yard with my
girlfriend and my brother. He had called his wife, and she was there, too. We
began to tell stories about how funny Dad was, and we started to laugh. Our
laughter floated into the house, and before I knew it, everybody was outside. One
by one, we each told a story, and our tears of sorrow were replaced by tears of
joy.
The funeral home had come to take Dad, and they waited with
us for over an hour until the last of the family could see him. Family and
friends came and went for the remainder of the evening, and by 9:00, we had
said goodbye to the last of the visitors. It was just Mom, Grandma, my
girlfriend, and me. We stripped his bed and cleared all his medication from his
room. We cleaned that room until it was spotless. The hiss of his oxygen
machine had been silenced. The TV had been shut off hours ago, along with his
police scanner. There was a sense of peace now, like the weight of his sickness
had made the room sick, too, and now it was healed.
It had been an exhausting day, and I was surprised to find
myself yawning. We were all drained and needed a good night’s sleep. I said
goodnight to my mom and grandmother and went with my girlfriend down to the
basement apartment. As we lay in bed, she asked me if I was OK. I laughed and
said, “Not really—my dad just died,” but I was going to be OK.
I rolled over and looked at her. “I never thought it would
be like this. You prepare and prepare, but when the time comes to say goodbye,
you’re never really ready. It hurts like hell that he’s gone. It hurts so deep
in my soul that I am forever changed—forever. But I also feel this sense of
relief that it’s finally over. I’ve lived on edge for months now. I’m not
afraid of the telephone ringing anymore. I don’t have to worry about getting THAT
call.”
She stroked my arm. I could see the tears running down her
face. “But you know what else I feel? I feel honored to have been there. I felt
dignity come back to him. He isn’t this sick person that can’t take care of
himself anymore. He is a whole man again. He’s not trapped in that body filled
with disease and pain.”
I began to cry again, but these were tears of joy. My dad
was free, and I didn’t have to worry about him anymore. He wasn’t in pain, and
he wasn’t scared! Death had given him his pride back and taken him out of a
world of pain and shame. The cell doors had been opened, and he was free from
that prison of a body. Death had given him freedom, and because of that, I was
happy to let him go.
