Excerpt
I’ll never forget the day that my father went into the hospital. We were sitting in the living room together, looking at re-runs of Bonanza, while my mom was cleaning houses for her clients in Springdale. My father was drinking gin from a tumbler, when suddenly; he began coughing and wouldn’t stop. He kept coughing and coughing, until he began coughing up blood with dark matter in it. I ran and called my mom’s number on the wall and she called the ambulance from where she was at. Twenty minutes later, the ambulance arrived and took my father to the hospital and that was the last time I saw him.
When my mother came home from the hospital that night, she took me home. I went into the living room and stuck my finger in the blood and matter on the chair. My mother walked up behind me and explained that inside the blood was pieces of my father’s liver. She said he was too poisoned to talk and could only nod or blink his eyes. They had been told 3 years ago that my father had cirrhosis, but he continued to drink. We sat there, and as she held me, she told me that more than likely, my father wouldn’t be returning and I should write him a letter telling him what I wanted to say. We cried and stayed up talking about death, their marriage and how he felt about me. She told me that when I came into their lives, I made it worth living.