gone home for the night, the nurses clustered outside at their hallway station. The
room was quiet. The whole floor of the hospital was quiet. It was the first week
of March, the winter snow having just melted, leaving the city in what felt like a
perpetual state of dampness. My dad had been in the hospital about ten days then.
He was fifty-five years old, but he looked like an old man, with yellowed eyes
and arms too heavy to move. He was awake but unable to speak, whether due to
the swelling or due to emotion, I’ll never know.
I sat in a chair next to his bed and watched him laboring to breathe. When I
put my hand in his, he gave it a comforting squeeze. We looked at each other
silently. There was too much to say, and at the same time it felt as if we’d said
everything. What was left was only one truth. We were reaching the end. He
would not recover. He was going to miss the whole rest of my life. I was losing
his steadiness, his comfort, his everyday joy. I felt tears spilling down my cheeks.
Keeping his gaze on me, my father lifted the back of my hand to his lips and
kissed it again and again and again. It was his way of saying, Hush now, don’t cry.
He was expressing sorrow and urgency, but also something calmer and deeper, a
message he wanted to make clear. With those kisses, he was saying that he loved
me with his whole heart, that he was proud of the woman I’d become. He was
saying that he knew he should have gone to the doctor a lot sooner. He was
asking for forgiveness. He was saying good-bye.
I stayed with him until he fell asleep that night, leaving the hospital in icy
darkness and driving back home to Euclid Avenue, where my mother had already
turned off the lights. We were alone in the house now, just me and my mom and
whatever future we were now meant to have. Because by the time the sun came
up, he’d be gone. My father—Fraser Robinson III—had a heart attack and passed
away that night, having given us absolutely everything.