recovering for a week now. he’s not recovering. a phone in the middle of the night, saturday into sunday, while playing cards my grandfather slumped onto his brother-in-law gently, upbruptly, as if reaching for a dropped chip. he was no longer breathing. my grandmother, his wife of 56 years, tried to give him mouth-to-mouth.
15 minutes of not breathing, not recovering. in hospital now, some glimmers of hope, but more or less, no change. he winces at pain, but it’s a reflex, or even worse, an imagination of what his children want to see. my father is there, literally putting his father’s house in order. he swings from resignation and acceptance, to disbelief and despair.
a week agao, when he called, he had said to me, “it’s the phone call i’ve dreading to hear. it’s the phone i’ve been expecting…”
some time between then and now, i had lost everything in the last year i had written. a year gone, and lately it was getting good, rolling into May had some steam. but with a server crash and stupid user error, i could not recover it, only everything from before.
to recover, to salvage, to save, to cherish again, to prize again, to ignore again, to cover from pain, from illness, from abject and senseless randomness. a week later and they say he’s not going to recover, my grandfather in the one in a million shot he pulls out of his coma, will not be the man we had known. i never really knew him, who really knows their grandfather, much less on who was introduced to me when i was late in my teens, nearing twenty.
if, when or ever he opens his eyes, he will have little memory of the man he once was, if any at all. nothing to recover, nothing to forget, nothing left to live for. another ghost for this life parade.
i’m sorry i never got to know you when i should have. i’m sorry i did not devote enough time to you and what you could have meant to me. i’m sorry i let language and shame stop me from doing so.