NIGHT

by Gita Tewari

I walk though the silent house at night where shadows take on mysterious shapes and sounds take on almost mystical qualities. Sometimes I think I see my father sitting on the yellow couch where he used to sit all night long when he stopped going to sleep at night. I would walk through the living room to the kitchen to get a midnight snack and see him sitting there his face impassive. What was he thinking? I was still aware of his strong personality and I felt somewhat apprehensive as I passed by him almost as though I was an interloper passing through no man’s land. Sometimes I think I still feel his presence in the house, waiting in the wings, the way he used to wait for me when I first moved home after college and would stay out until the early morning hours.

I look out the back window to see a full moon shining brightly and a small rabbit sitting in the grass. I remember the day they brought the hospital bed into the living room and showed us how to use the controls to raise and lower the bed. I remember those final days when he laid in the bed and the light would shine in on his face through the half open curtain. His eyes were closed and he had stopped eating and drinking. He had already left us for another world. I began trying to prepare myself then for the years of missing him. The doctors told us that it would be inhumane to intubate him. They called this the most compassionate way to die.

The hospice nurse who came that night told us that we were lucky because he had a peaceful death. I was not prepared to see death when it came, but I knew when death entered the house because my father’s spirit had already left the last time he came home from the hospital.

Brett, the grief counselor from the hospice told me that people decide when they want to die whether they’re cancer patients or patients suffering from Alzheimer’s like my father. Did he want to leave us? That made me feel sad, but I realize that is selfish. At the memorial service, one of our former neighbors said, “It was his time to go.” Maybe it sounds like a cliché but I found it strangely comforting.

Gita Tewari is a freelance Writer and Editor based in Chicago.  Contact Gita.