Right now I am the flower girl.I bring fresh flowers,dump out the old ones, the greenish waterthat smells like dirty teethinto the bathroom sink, snip off the stem endswith surgical scissors I borrowedfrom the nursing station,put them into a jarI brought from home, because they don't have vasesin this hotel for the ill,place them on the table beside my fatherwhere he can't see thembecause he won't open his eyes.
He lies flattened under the white sheet.He says he is on a ship,and I can see it --the functional white walls, the minimal windows,the little bells, the rubbery footsteps of strangers,the whispering all aroundof the air-conditioner, or else the ocean,and he is on a ship;he's giving us up, giving up everythingbut the breath going inand out of his diminished body;minute by minute he's sailing slowly away,away from us and our waving handsthat do not wave.
The women come in, two of them, in blue;it's no use being kind, in here,if you don't have hands like theirs --large and capable, the handsof plump muscular angels,the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.It hurts, but as little as possible.Pain is their lore. The rest of usare helpless amateurs.
A suffering you can neither cure nor enter --there are worse things, but not many.After a while it makes us impatient.Can we do anything but feel sorry?
I sit there, watching the flowersin their pickle jar. He is asleep, or not.I think: He looks like a turtle.Or: He looks erased.But somewhere in there, at the far end of the tunnelof pain and forgetting he's trapped inis the same father I knew before,the one who carried the green canoeover the portage, the painter trailing,myself with the fishing rods, slippingon the wet boulders and slapping flies.That was the last time we went there.
There will be a last time for this also,bringing cut flowers to this white room.Sooner or later I toowill have to give everything up,even the sorrow that comes with these flowers,even the anger,even the memory of how I brought themfrom a garden I will no longer have by then,and put them beside my dying father,hoping I could still save him.
