My Son Brian:

My father lived in an empty room. It was the kind of room where the walls were each painted with a different shade of white but they’d still all look at you with the same bland. Where the blue, inch-thick carpet could take just about any kind of beating before calling it quits. And where the windows were already beaten, scratched inside and out, with only a cloudy view of asphalt and white lines.

It was the kind of room that one doesn’t choose to live in. It was the kind of room that one gets sent.

The nurses had just taken him to the bathroom moments before I had arrived and let me wait by his room in the meantime. The room looked the same way for a while now. In the corner, sat a small Christmas tree with a few of our old family ornaments brought from home. They weren’t special in any particular way, just the same kind of ornaments that you’d find anywhere else. But they had been ours long enough for the paint to fade to a tin and for all the hooks to be replaced with whatever we could find around the house.

In another corner, sat his favorite chair from the dining table that we all used to sit at. Five of us used to sit in those chairs. And then, cancer made it four. Accident made it three. And then, it was three for a while until none of us really lived there anymore. Just him and four of those empty chairs.

He had a bed with two pillows that was much bigger than he needed and a large wooden table with some drawers and a shaded lamp on top. Against one of the walls was a television screen of maybe 24-inches or so, and it pointed across the room to a closet that was as empty as the room itself.

It looked the same as it did a week earlier. And the week before that. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Except for what had sat at the center of his desk.

It was a notepad with sheets no bigger than your regular-sized piece of paper. Blue lines traveled from left to right with faint scribbles between them throughout the center of the page. He had written something across the top that you couldn’t interpret from the other side of the room. But I knew what was there. Mainly because I had seen that same notepad before.

Across the top, there were three words. The same three words that brought us all here in the first place.

My Son Brian:

-

On a good day, I can make the drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque in less than an hour. It was a drive that I had grown accustomed to doing on most weekends to visit my father at the Rancho Hills Assisted Living Center. It wasn’t ideal to have an 85-year-old man live an hour away. But after he had gone through every nurse in Santa Fe, we had no choice but to go searching elsewhere.

Why each nurse quit was a different reason every time. Sometimes, it wasn’t personal. And other times, biting and knives were involved as well as an attempted runaway one time with a stolen bicycle. But ever since we changed places to Albuquerque, things had gotten better. Just about the only thing you could complain about now was the drive.

When he was staying at our old house, it was only a 15-minute drive away and so I would get to see him more often. I remember seeing him in January a few years back. He was doing well. Late in his 70’s but still able to get around on his own.

The bushes had overgrown into the walkway and some leaves had fallen on the tall faint-yellow grass, but you could still make your way to the front door without any problem. When you pressed the doorbell, you could feel the old chimes echo through the house. And as you waited that day in the sunny desert wind, you could hear him slowly making his way down the stairs. The sounds of several locks would turn and he would open the wooden door.

“Happy New Year, Dad,” as our eyes met through the metal screen.

“Happy New Year, Kid.”

“I brought some food. Hope you’re hungry.”

He nodded, opened the screen door, and held it for me with his trembling hands.

On most days, we would spend our time watching episodes of Jeopardy from the night before. When we started, he was still pretty good at answering questions and we would have fun competing with each other.

And then a few years passed and the game got quieter. He claimed that all the answers were in his head but that his reactions just weren’t quick enough to say. A little while after that, I held back on answering questions just because it didn’t do anything but make him feel bad.

And lately, it’s just gotten to the point where we stopped talking during the show all together. We would have a lot more fun just watching those younger folks play on the TV rather than play ourselves.

He would do his best to sit upright against the couch although his head would arch forward occasionally to read the screen. His elbows each rested on the arms of the chair. And his hands would grip around the side cushions as his eyes looked on enthusiastically.

-

On whatever space we could find on the table in front of the couch, we would eat. It was a table littered in mail, candy wrappers, used tissues, and q-tips. But you could always find a corner to eat off of. During the commercials, I would do my best to clean it up but it never seemed like I got anywhere. More junk would always find its way to the table every time I came.

That New Years, I saw it for the first time. The yellow notepad with my name across the top.

My Son Brian:

“What’s this?” I asked as I picked up the pad.

“I wanted to write you and your sister some letters that you can hold onto when I pass.”

“That’s alright, dad. We got plenty of pictures and things to remember you by.”

“But, no letters,” he said abruptly. “And it’d be nice to have some words from me.”

“What do you think you’ll write?”

“I ain’t sure. Haven’t found the right words yet.”

Of the many things my father was, he was just about the furthest thing from a writer. It’s not so much that he wasn’t bright. He just really wasn’t the writing type. Not even for a trip to the grocery store. He used to look in the fridge before he left, claim to have committed everything we needed to memory, and then forget a few things of course and need to make a second trip.

When it came to holidays, he was more the type who would pay a personal visit or speak to you on the phone. And on birthdays, he would give you a card with only his name signed underneath whatever message was already printed on it.

My father was a lot of things. A stubborn man. A thoughtful man. And a hard man. But I knew for sure that he was the last man who you gave a pen to.

“Maybe you’ve said everything that you’ve wanted to say already,” I added.

“No. I know there’s some stories that I haven’t told you… Have I told you about when I went to Niagara falls?”

“And you dropped your camera into the water?”

“More than that! The camera was completely drowned. The lens cracked off the body, but we managed to fish the film out with a net. And it had some of the best pictures of your mother from the whole trip.”

He left his chair and walked over to the cabinet across the room.

“Dad.” I paused the TV and got up after him. “Let me help you with that.”

His hands shook as he opened the cabinet and pulled out one of the pictures on the shelf.

“What about when your mother and I met?”

“And how your parents set you up in the waiting room at the doctor’s office?”

“Yeah. She was reading Life magazine.”

“And you started talking to her because grandma thought it was Wife magazine.”

“That’s right.” He laughed. “I thought she had just been married. Turns out, your grandma was just going blind.”

“I remember mom also mentioning that the only reason she had the magazine to begin with was to avoid making eye contact with you. She was smitten.”

“Was she?” He thought. “I don’t think she ever told me that.”

His watery eyes wandered throughout the cabinet. It was an ocean full of memories to him. Some of which he could tell you the story of from start to finish. And others that were just pictures to him at that point. I never asked him about some of the things that were in that cabinet. The rifle bullets and the leather hats. An unopened chocolate box and a box of old cigarettes.

Maybe he didn’t have the heart to tell me about them or maybe there was no reason why he put those things there at all. But I had come to terms that everything that was there was just who my father was and as much who he was as his own flesh and bones. It was his world. His life. And no one else could fully understand it except him.

-

I wasn’t with him on the last day that he spent in that house. At least not until later that night.

But a few nights before then, we had still done our usual routine. I brought over the same kind of food to eat on the same messy table in the quiet living room with the game show playing on the TV. As he opened the door, I could see his hands shake a lot more than usual. Which made it harder for him to open that door. Harder for him to eat. And nearly impossible to write.

“What if I wrote you what you wanted to say,” I remember asking him. “They’d still be your words on those pages.”

“But they wouldn’t be my letters.”

He stubbornly picked up the pen that night while we were sitting there on the couch, determined to write something. Held the pen in his grip and did everything he could to hold it straight. The marks would each start on the lines but he couldn’t find a way to stay between them. And when he managed to stay between, he couldn’t remember what he was going to write.

A few nights later, the police had called me over and explained what had happened. And when I got there, I saw the red and blue sirens from a mile down the street. The front of his car had run right into the side of a parked truck. The car windshield was shattered into the truck door and the front wheel of the truck had rolled somewhere down the road. Luckily, the truck was empty or they might have been dead.

My father, on the other hand, was alive as he could be. He sat on the sidewalk with a gash on top of his head and the start of a bruise around his left eye. His head pointed down to the street as his eyes drooled to the ground.

The Sheriff had mentioned that he was driving over to see me and claimed that he wanted to tell me something. But by the time we had gotten his car out of the street and brought my father to the hospital, he couldn’t remember what he wanted to say.

It took a few days, but we moved him out to a new place to live in. Another place after that. And then finally to the Rancho Hills Center in Albuquerque.

-

“Brian,” he said as he slowly made his way through the doorway with the nurse behind him.

“Great to see you, Dad.”

He made his way to the dining chair as I sat beside him on the bed corner. The nurse turned the volume up on the TV as our eyes both fixed on it.

“You eating enough?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Sleeping enough?”

“Yes.”

I paused. “Can’t believe we made it another year.”

“Me neither.”

His head arched forward from the backseat cushion. His elbows were no longer wide enough to reach the arms of the chair as they leaned on his thighs. And his fingers hung off into the space between his legs and trembled like branches off a cliff.

When he spoke, it wasn’t for very long. His voice would crack at the start of his sentences. And when he moved, it wasn’t for very much. Unless the nurse was around to help him. 

The years hadn’t been kind and the days ahead weren’t bright either but every much of my father was still there. I could see the stubbornness to his feet as they kept still when his knees shook. The deep thought to his eyes as they traveled throughout the room. And the hardness to his bones that kept his shoulders high despite the weight of his neck.

He was still all the things he was to me when I was a boy. And all the things to me when I became a man. All the lessons and all the stories that he’d used to tell me.

“I saw your notepad over there.” I pointed to the table. “You remember what you were trying to do with that?”

“No.”

“You were writing letters to me and Laura.” I walked over to the desk to bring the pad to him. “You see that there?” as I pointed to the words on the top. “That’s your handwriting. I think that you were about to start this letter too.”

His eyes scanned the empty spaces of the page.

“What was I going to write?” he asked.

“I’m not so sure actually… But you wrote a ton of these before. About all the adventures you’d been on… I still remember the first letter you wrote me. It was about when you went to Niagara Falls.”

“I went?”

“Yeah. You went with mom. And you broke your camera too. Dropped it from 50 feet in the air to the deepest part of the river. You told me that the camera shattered into a million pieces and the lens into a thousand shards of little glass. The camera was done for. But you managed to swim to the bottom and fish it out of the dirt… They ended up being mom’s favorite photos. She was the happiest when you found the film and even happier when she would look at those photos.”

The air got real quiet and a long silence stood between us. The TV played, but it was clear that neither of us had ever started listening to it. I placed the pad on his lap and his eyes looked down towards it.

“Did I write any more letters?” he asked.

“You did.”

As he sat there, I shared with him any stories I remembered. And I made up a few too. And when the day faded to dusk and the last of his arms gave out, the nurse and I had brought him to bed. Rested his head on the pillow and tucked him under the sheets. As I turned the lights off, I saw the notepad on his dining chair in the corner.

I pressed my finger against the top, tore the first page off across the perforation, and folded the letter delicately into my pocket. It wasn’t the letter that he had hoped to write nor did it have any of the stories that he had hoped to tell. But it was from him and that was enough for me.