The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

I moved back into my parents’ house for the last four months. I put a hospital bed in the front room where the good davenport used to be, because the front room had the morning light and Daddy liked the morning. I did everything. I did the things a daughter is not supposed to have to do for her father, and I did them without making him feel ashamed, because that is the one true skill I have in this world, letting a person keep their dignity while you do the undignified things that keep them alive and then help them die.

Craig came twice.

I am not exaggerating for effect. I counted, the way you count things when they are breaking your heart. He came at Easter, for an afternoon, in a golf shirt, and he stood in the doorway of the front room and could not make himself come all the way in, and he said, “He looks good, Nell. You’ve got him looking good.” And then he went out to the kitchen and talked to Mom about the insurance for two hours and left before dark because he had a thing in Wichita.

He came the second time three days before the end, when I called him and told him flat out that if he wanted to see our father while our father still knew him, he needed to come now. He came. He stood in the doorway again. Daddy was mostly gone by then, floating up near the ceiling the way they do at the end, but he surfaced for a minute and he saw Craig and he said, “There’s my boy.” Not “there’s my kids.” There’s my boy. And Craig cried, and I was glad he cried, and then he went back to Wichita, and I was the one who was holding our father’s hand four days later at twenty past three in the morning when he took the last breath and then did not take another one.

I called the funeral home. I called the pastor. I called my mother, who was asleep down the hall, and I sat with her while she cried, and then I washed my father’s body myself, because I was not going to let a stranger do it, and because it was the last thing left that I could do for him.

At the funeral, my mother stood in the fellowship hall at Bethel Methodist and received the whole town, and when people said what a hard thing it had been, she said, “Craig handled everything. I don’t know what we would have done without Craig. He took care of all the arrangements.”

Craig had paid for the stone. That is true. He wrote a check for a good granite stone and I will not pretend that was nothing. But a check is a thing you write at a desk in Wichita, and I had been in the front room at twenty past three in the morning, and my mother stood up in front of the whole county and gave the dying to the man who wrote the check.

I did not correct her. You do not correct your mother at your father’s funeral. You stand there in your funeral cardigan and you let it happen, and you tell yourself it does not matter who gets the credit, what matters is that Daddy did not die alone and afraid.

But a thing like that does not leave you. It goes down inside and it sits there.