The Orange Leaf

This morning I awoke startled by the sour taste of dread oozing from my mouth. Twelve mornings ago I first felt dread sneak into my body like an unwanted houseguest that I couldn’t evict. Each morning since it has climbed higher through me. It started at the tips of my toes, then reached my legs, stomach, heart, and, this morning, finally, my head. As it climbed, it poured viscous, sour honey into my ventricles and capillaries until I was consumed. I knew that the day I first tasted the dread would be the day my father died. Today must be the day. 

I stared at the golden, metallic sheen of the doorknob in front of me. It was fastened to a large, wooden door. The door was plain to most; its true form revealed itself only to me. It was a portal between worlds. 

The world in which I presently belonged included my father. Good-humoured, quick, and always alive. The literal sense of alive, but, more importantly, in the way that vast, fat fields of long green grass dance with invisible wind, always moving, always captivating.

I only needed to perform a simple movement: force my arm forward, grab hold of the doorknob, twist it to the left, and fall into my father’s room. I drew my eyes down to the patterned carpet under my loafers. Roots had grown around my ankles, tying me to the floor. I knew that once I freed myself of these roots they would metamorphose into steel springs, lurking just under the carpet, waiting for my return. In one remorseless motion, they would then open themselves and launch me into a world in which my father was remembered instead of experienced. 

I took a deep breath, letting my lungs fill and my chest lift. The air I inhaled had become heavier than the air I exhaled, and with each subsequent breath, I could feel my stomach being weighed down until it was somewhere under the care home's basement. When I was at my heaviest, I lunged my arm forward, grabbed the doorknob, and twisted left.

I stepped into the room and clicked the door closed behind me. The haphazard ticking of a large clock on the wall crescendoed into a cacophony that scratched my brain. The scent of cheap cinnamon candles enveloped me. My father insisted on burning at least four at all times so he couldn’t “smell death.” I wasn’t sure how you could smell anything, ever again, after five minutes of exposure. 

My father had lived in this palliative care home for six months. Stagnant and stable for some time prior to this move, his health afflictions began rapidly multiplying, growing in severity like a ball of snow being rolled downhill by children making snowmen.

“He is eighty-six, after all,” my daughter had remarked months ago. The older I got, the younger that number seemed. 

“Thomas, you’re here,” my father breathed in my direction. This was his perennial cold open. His voice always carried a note of surprise even though I had visited his bedside dutifully, daily, since he moved into this home. I shuffled out of my jacket, yet still felt overwhelmed by the heat. My father kept his room several degrees warmer than hell.  

“Of course I am, Dad.” I always answered him the same way.

My father hardened at the sound of my voice. His leathery cheeks pulled on his eyes and held his face in an expression I had never seen. I fell into it like a coin sinking to the bottom of a wishing fountain; if only I could use that wish to discover what it meant. It was raw. It wasn’t intentional. What was it?

Fear? No, his eyes appeared too soft. Acceptance? No, his chin quivered. I ran through all the states of being that my mind could call forth. None of them fit what my father had plastered upon his face. 

He was bundled tightly in layers of knitted blue and cream wool blankets that my wife had taught herself how to knit to make the move more comfortable for him. The material scratched him, but he had sworn me to secrecy on the matter. He rolled onto his back and began to speak again. 

“I believe today is my last day. It’s time.” I watched my father’s sickly chest rise and fall as he expunged these words. They hurt him to speak, naturally, but the corners of his mouth twitched in a way that suggested something more than mere death was harming him. 

“I know it is, Dad,” I said with a morose sigh. He didn’t seem startled by my words. Perhaps the sour honey had filled him as well. “How do you want to spend it?” I asked.

“By telling you something.” He replied. Once again, his mouth moved in a way that betrayed the calm facade he aimed to present to me. 

“I would like that,” I replied anxiously. 

“Thomas…” his voice went down an octave as it often did when he had something serious to share, “... this isn’t something you’re going to like hearing, and I understand if it changes how you see me, I do. No one knows what I’m about to share with you. But it’s a truth that must be shared before I go.” His eyes quickly darted to the side to glimpse me briefly. 

My father has always been a very open man, and comprehension of how others didn’t live life in the same manner escaped him. Embarrassing stories, controversial opinions, taboo questions; he would turn himself inside out to any audience, willing or captured. I had never known him to keep anything to himself. My curiosity was piqued. I encouraged him to continue. 

“It’s about your mother, Thomas,” he said, once again trying to steal a glance at me. 

I darted my eyes to the window in the corner of the room and was thankful to find it closed. A slight gust of breeze could have blown me off my chair. My mother was one topic that was never discussed in our home, and that rule was strictly enforced. 

“What about her, dad?” I asked softly. 

“It’s about the night she died,” he responded, gravely. 

The stomach that had sunk under the basement suddenly jumped up into my throat. If my father hadn’t continued speaking it would have come out of my mouth. 

“It didn’t happen as you think it did, and I need to share what really happened.” 

When my mother fell ill in 1982, euthanasia was in its infancy of being in the public consciousness. The complex legal and ethical war meant it wasn’t an option for my mother, regardless of what percentage of her body the sickness consumed. My sister and I were mostly shielded from the exact details of her sickness, at least the exact details of it. We knew it was bad, we knew she was going to leave us soon, and we knew not to show her how sad we were.  

One evening in the summer of 1983, my father called my sister and me into the kitchen. It was a warm summer day. I remember that where my shorts ended, my bare legs began sticking to the vinyl upholstery of the black dining chair I sat in.

My parents explained how today was the day mom would join Grandma Sally and our old cat Newton in heaven.

I sat there and listened, sticking my legs to the vinyl and peeling them off, thinking that if I did this enough times, I could separate myself from my skin and avoid this situation altogether. 

My mother looked fine as she sat in front of us, although in hindsight, I imagine a wig and copious amounts of makeup were involved. They meticulously described their plan to us. My mother was to take more pills than she was supposed to, which would make her go into a peaceful, forever sleep. My father was going to hold her hand until she had floated away from her earthly bond. The plan may as well have been detailed to my twelve-year-old self in Latin.

“You’re going to kill mommy?” I remember asking my father in earnest. 

“No, your mother is going to put herself to sleep,” my father replied matter-of-factly. 

“So, like, killing yourself?” my sister choked through tears in my mother’s direction. 

“Yes, sweetheart. My sickness isn’t going to get better, and I want to be able to leave you all while I’m still strong enough to show you how much I love you. I don’t want you to remember a sick, sad woman when you think of me.”

I was still confused, but my mother’s calmness assured a subconscious part of my young mind that the plan was good. 

Later that night I lay in bed in my grandmother’s spare bedroom. Her phone rang in the hall, I couldn’t hear what was said, but after hanging up, she kissed my sister and me and told us with tears in her eyes that “Mommy was in heaven now.” Three days later, we held the funeral, and three days after that, all the photos of my mother were removed from our home, and we weren’t to speak of her again. It pained my father too much. 

Now, fourty-one years later, my dying father, whose remaining heartbeats you could count, wanted to unseal the vault that dozens of therapists tried to convince me was better kept closed. 

I caught my tongue as it made a dash to disappear. “What really happened that night, Dad?” I choked out.

“I… killed her,” my father said gruffly.

His words perplexed me. Not since my first reaction to their plan in 1983 had I ever considered that my mother’s death would, in fact, be a killing. To me, I pictured her death to be as inescapable as an orange leaf breaking away from its branch on a crisp October morning. We were warned of telling anyone the factual circumstances of my mother’s death for fear of legal retribution, but there was never any malice attached to that idea; our secrecy was rooted in familial preservation. 

“No, she took the pills herself. You were just there to help her be comfortable, but you didn’t kill her,” I responded.

For the first time, the events of that night were becoming unclear to me. 

“Thomas…” my father paused.

I counted twelve painful ticks on the clock. My mother’s suicide has always been black and white; no shades of grey allowed.

“... she changed her mind. She swallowed the pills, lay back, and was at peace, for a moment. Then she opened her eyes and told me she had made a mistake. She begged me to rush her to the hospital, but I didn’t. I sat there, holding her down, until the pills took her,” my father’s eyes didn’t search for me this time.

I saw his shoulders concave into himself, trying to make his physical form as small as he likely felt. My jaw, which had been slack with astonishment, now clenched closed like tectonic plates forming a mountain range. A stream of blood began entering my mouth.  

“What do you mean?” I asked, surprising myself with how slow and steady the voice that poured from my lips sounded. 

“If I had done what your mother had asked of me, she would not have died that day. There was time for her to be saved. I don’t know how much longer she would have lived; not even the doctors knew, but she wouldn’t have died that day,” explained my father, his voice raising as if loudness is what would force his point home. 

“Are you sure? You haven’t been feeling yourself lately, Dad. You’re remembering wrong,” I pleaded with him and God for this to be true. I could feel my body and mind separating. This couldn’t be real. 

“Thomas, I have lived with this every day for the past fourty-one years. If there is one thing I am sure of it is this. I let her die, and she didn’t want to. I watched it and did nothing. But you never saw how bad it was, Thomas. The sickness was ripping her apart. It was only going to grow, and she was only going to feel more pain, and I couldn’t bear witness to it.” 

Suddenly, unconsciously, I was standing upright, feverishly pacing. What I was being told was diametrically opposed to the foundation of my beliefs. There were few things in life I was sure of, but chief among them are how my mother died and how my childhood died with her. I felt as though a prize fighter had just landed a right hook on me.

The orange leaf’s fall that night in 1983 wasn’t inescapable. No. It was viciously snatched down off its branch. It wasn’t given a chance to slowly break away and drift gracefully to the dirt below. The man lying before me was to blame. 

A breakthrough drug was discovered soon after my mother’s death, which allowed one woman in Toronto twelve more years of life post-diagnosis. My mother got less than one. She missed the hockey tournament where I scored the most goals. She missed my sister becoming valedictorian. And while she might not have made it to my wedding or to meet her grandkids, she might have. She never got the chance to try.

The room grew several degrees hotter. All I could see was anger. 

I felt something move between my hands suddenly. I looked down. My long fingers were interlocked around an old man’s neck. He wasn’t my father anymore; there wasn’t an inch of him that I recognized. Stuttering through shallow breath, the old man told me how he knew it was selfish, how it haunted him every day since, and how sorry he was. I couldn’t hear him over the clock ticking.

Red droplets began falling from my mouth and spreading sideways down his cheeks, following the path of the braided rivers his wrinkles formed. My blood mixed with his salty tears. I gripped harder. 

I wanted him to be scared. To feel like how my mother must have felt. I knelt above him and watched his face as I clutched his throat, but disappointingly, terror was absent from his eyes. In fact, the only thing I could discern from his face was a look of understanding.

A realization washed over me as the man was a handful of breaths away from losing his life: his secret killed him long before today.

Suddenly, a perspective clicked into place like the pieces of interlocking blocks my mother and I played with in our sunlit living room. At my hockey tournament, my sister’s graduation, my wedding; in moments of celebration, my father would become insular, sinking into his shadow. This was the antithesis of his character, so I always discarded it simply as one man’s pain in wishing his wife was there to celebrate with their family. Only now I recognized the shadow he crept into. It was guilt, incomprehensible pain caused by his selfishness and cowardice. 

Two truths became crystalline simultaneously. This old man was going to die soon, and it was not going to be by my hands. I knew it didn’t matter much if I killed him or myself; it would mean the same in the end.  

I unlocked my fingers and pulled my arms back into myself, letting out a cry of origin unknown. I fought against my racing mind and tried to steady myself. I sat down on the floor, my back against the hard wall. The adrenaline continued to course through me, but as I sat there breathing, I felt my body and mind reconnect.

The old man’s eyes searched for me. I met his gaze, staring down his pupils with such ferocity I felt as though my eyeballs may pop out of their sockets. We stared at each other for an eternity, our eyes having a thousand conversations that would be impossible to say with our mouths. 

Eventually, slowly, I spoke. 

“One day, I may learn to understand why you did what you did; perhaps part of me already does, but I can’t forgive you,” I said.

“I can’t forgive me, either, son, but I’m glad you know the truth anyhow,” my father replied. His eyes detached from mine. 

He slowly let his eyelids press together, and residual tears cascaded down his face. He rolled towards me and took a sharp breath. Without checking his pulse, I knew it was his last.

He lay under his mountain of blankets, truly still for the first time in his life. He was no longer moving, but he was still captivating. I called for the nurse as my head swirled. I tried to make sense of what had just happened, but all I could rapture within me were questions. 

Should his life be reduced to one horrible decision in a sea of a thousand good ones? Is the light he shone on me, my sister, my wife, my kids, now forever diminished because of his inaction one evening? Was he allowed to feel relief in death? I had a suspicion the rest of my life would be spent searching for those answers. 

I stepped back through the portal. Cool air rushed to greet my face. The roots that had pulled at me had disappeared, and I could make out the tops of the steel springs lurking underneath the carpet.

A resolve fell over me. What happened within those walls would stay forever in that room. If I were to empty the contents of the conversation out, it would do nothing but harm the receptacle. Besides, the perpetrator of the evil was dead. What more could those seeking vengeance desire?

I planted my feet on the springs, ready to be launched into my new world.