Living Forever
It feels like yesterday, but it was much, much longer.
Your father asleep in his hospital bed.
Most of the tubes and machines unplugged
in recognition of the inevitable.
The room was strangely quiet after days of vigil.
The only sound the death rattle of his breathing.
Again. Pause. Again.
It was my shift to stay with him. I would take the night.
Time stood still as it only does in death and love.
You sat with him. Held his hand. Remembering
the journey we had made together, a mix
of love and anger and alcohol and love again,
of his eventual pride in me, and mine in him,
the one constant of the past fifty some odd years.
Time measured in breaths. Him unaware.
Me aware enough for both of us.
The nurses were kind, rustling in and out
as little as possible. No words spoken.
A quick check. The required. No more. Wisps of care.
I could have played music. He loved jazz, old-style blues,
but silence seemed appropriate somehow,
silence and the death rattle.
He passed early, early in the morning,
He was there. Then he wasn’t. All in a moment.
The longest night. And a new day, suddenly parentless.
Death, love and memory. Each of them live forever.
About this poem
I am sitting in the “Deluxe Diner in Shillington, PA. I am down here to do the funeral for a dear friend’s father. And so of course, it takes me back to the night my own father died a few years ago. That is where the picture was taken, out of the hospital window, a bit after his passing.
Not everyone had the privilege of resolving deep issues with parents early on, and living in a renewed and strong love afterwards. I did. I am grateful.
Tom
Quarry House 
Tom,
My dad had Alzheimer’s Disease when he died, and he didn’t know who I was. However, I used to sing hymns, and he would actually sing along. Like you, I was there when he breathed his last breath. I know that I will see him in heaven. Dr. Jim Brown
I was with my father when he died. As you say – he was there and then he wasn’t. He had not been awake and there was no change but I heard what I realised was the death rattle. I had had a difficult relationship with him and felt terribly conflicted. Strangely, just a few months later fate brought me back to that same room where he died which was surreal.
I can imagine!