My dear friends, everyone has a father so I know you’ll understand . . .

He dozed off to sleep again, only waking to share his outrageous dreams with me. He calls them hallucinations. Stories he tells me (in his words, not mine) of blacks and jews, stories of wars he is fighting for everyone’s freedom. There are social injustices that hold him so tightly that even on his possible “death bed” he is fighting for others’ freedom. And in some sense, he is fighting for his freedom too. Freedom from this infection that has prevaded his body and taken control of his heart and brain.
We giggle at what we can. The tv remote was his weapon of mass distruction. The small water bottles were his make-shift granades. At some point he asked the nurses to call the local police for all of their protection.
He wakes up confused and alone here in the hospital at night, unable to leave either his bed or brain.
Seventy seven years of life in this man. Years of uncertainity, to bravery, to love for his wife and family, to winding down into “golden years” of ballroom dancing and traveling the world.
And in the mundane, life rears its ugly head. During the 2020 pandemic and the slowness of living, he began his downward spiral.
One more procedure they told me, just to remove the tube from his kidney and prepare him to leave. Prepare him to go to a rehab facility that will keep him in quarantine for 14 days.
I had a hard time remembering all of the things I had wanted to say. I couldn’t think. My stomach was rumbling, my face was hot from wearing a mask for over two hours, and suddenly none of it seemed important.
The rest of the world, chores at home, seemed silly compared to waiting with him. He timeline was confused from all the meds and sleeping while nurses and doctors passed in and out of his room with faces covered.
A hour became a day, a week became two in his mind, time was spreading out while it was standing still.
Time is funny like that.

You think you have enough when you don’t, and it never felt as finite as it did in that moment.