Sitting by the metal bed, I had no job but to watch. No contribution to make, no internal query to find answer to.
I watched a single breath, a lonely inhalation, and waited as a slight pause was followed by the inevitable outward breeze.
My mother, next to me and holding my father’s hand, looked up at this intake of air, searching my father’s face in case the breath signified intention—to communicate, to breathe again, to continue. The post-exhale pause extended, and she looked down again, at their clasped hands, waiting. He breathed out.
Lying in the impersonal, standard-issue hospital bed, my father seemed sunken and tentative. His skin was the color of the mud in a volcanic valley, a melding of beige, grey, and timelessness. And endless time past.
My mother and I waited together. In homage to the magnitude of the moment, we both curbed the incessant thought stream that usually took us everywhere but the present moment. Though each of us, in our own head, was considering meanings, futures, and next steps, we reverently waited, as empty as possible, for the next breath.
Two minutes went by. Then three. Our pulses quickened, our hearts pounded—was it finished? He must be gone. But then his body remembered, again, to bring in life. It seemed so unreal, so improbable, that we interrupted the silence.
“I thought…”
“Yeah, me too. I don’t know how it’s possible to go that long without breathing.”
And then we dropped back into stillness, in reverent imitation of the body in front of us.
Another long empty stretch ended with the sharp punctuation of an improbable inhalation. And then my mother leaned over the edge of the bed, stretching to be near my father’s ear without lending the moment too much importance by standing.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can go. It’s okay to go now.”
Could he still hear? I didn’t know. Is there sentience, with so little oxygen for the brain? Neither of us wanted to think there wasn’t a person on that bed. We had no reason to think he had let go, in any way, of us and our common world.
After another endless stretch into forward time, he breathed, waited, and exhaled.
My mother and I maintained our vigil, but my father never breathed again. I’d asked him earlier that day, while he could still look at me through half-lidded eyes, “Are you scared?”
He’d made a tiny, slow movement of his head back and forth. No. And I wondered then if he knew what I’d known—that he wasn’t leaving that bed the same way he went into it. As I looked at his somehow unexpected stillness, I hoped he had understood my question and answered me truthfully. He’d gone without pain, and I wanted for him to also have left without fear.
My mother cried a little. And then she called the cremation society. I started making calls to relatives.
There were things to be done. My mother and I moved on, along with the world outside my father.