Last Cup of Coffee

Last Cup of Coffee

           The first thing I see when I return from the hospital is a cup of coffee, still sitting on the table, no longer steaming, but not quite cold either. Black, unsweetened, it sits in a cup half full—or half empty, depending on how you look at those things. The cup itself is yellow with a big smiley face on the side to keep up my dad’s spirits. He hasn’t had much to smile about for the past year or so. Now that my mom is gone, his dogs and his grandson are—were—probably the only bright spots in his life.

           The chair sits askew from the table, not in its proper spot, but I make no move to put it back. The ham is still in the oven; the potatoes sit on the cutting board, only half peeled. Everything here looks so normal for an Easter Sunday afternoon that I can almost pretend that the last hour or so never happened.

           Almost.

           The phone is already ringing nonstop. My brother can deal with that. For now, I am focused on the kitchen. The floor where my father fell needs to be mopped; the chair needs to be put back; the dishes in the sink need to be washed. I need to clean everything up and finish preparing dinner—but no, our neighbors are bringing dinner; I forgot—but my hands and feet can’t seem to move.

           I meander out to the garage, where the vacuum cleaner hose still lies in the dog runs. Stupid, ugly vacuum cleaner—I hate you! I have a strong urge to take a hammer to it, but even now I know that won’t do any good. Instead, I take a shot of Jägermeister straight from the deep freeze to brace me, feeling the cold burn its way down my throat and loosen my muscles. Back to the kitchen I go, no longer bothering to fight the flashback I know is coming. I stand in the exact spot where my dad’s chair was when he came in from vacuuming the dog runs . . .

  My dad went to the garage to clean out the dog runs. In his retirement after 30 years of teaching at the community college, he raised show dogs, Basenjis, his pride and joy. Several of them had become national champions. He kept only a handful of them at his house, saying that it wouldn’t be fair to take too many and not be able to give them the attention they deserved. He had a table in the backyard, just like at the dog shows, and worked with each of them every day, teaching them to heel, sit, lie down, and open their mouths for the judge without biting. His dogs, unlike his children, obeyed his every command.

The dogs had beds and short runs in the garage, and they all had access to the fenced-in yard, which meant that they often tracked mud and leaves into the garage runs. The garage runs constantly had to be vacuumed and sometimes mopped.  

When he came in from that job, he was sweating, and his face had a gray tinge to it.  His blood pressure was apparently acting up again, despite the medication he took to control it. “I don’t feel so good,” he said, sitting down at the table.

       “Here, then.” I took his cup out of the cabinet and poured him coffee from the ever-ready pot beside the sink, then set it at his right hand. "Just rest."

       He drank about half the cup and sniffed appreciatively at the ham roasting in the oven. “Boy, I sure am going to enjoy this dinner,” he said.

         “I hope so,” I said, peeling potatoes I had already washed. My mom used to fix mashed potatoes and gravy for every holiday meal and lots of other ones besides, and I was determined to keep up the tradition. Since my mom had died the year before, he had been eating lots of fast food and junk. He and my brother lived together now, and every weekend, I would come and cook for them. It was the one thing I could do to raise his spirits a little.

In a flash, my dad was toppling sideways, out of his chair and onto the floor with a loud thud, unable to catch himself. “Dad?” I said, looking up from the cutting board, but he didn’t respond. The coffee swayed back and forth in the cup from the impact.

My brother jumped up from his chair in the living room. “Dad!” he called.

Together, we turned him over. His face was a color I had never seen before, a purplish yellowish gray, and his eyes were as red as if he had been up all night. He looked up briefly at me, just a split second, as if to say, What in the world is going on here? and that was the last flash of consciousness.

I tried giving him CPR, even though I had no idea what I was doing, while my brother went next door to bring the neighbor, a surgeon, to help. The neighbor came tearing into the kitchen, which pulled my eight-year-old son away from the cartoons he had been watching in the front room. I blocked the way with my body. “Donnie,” I said, “Grand-Dad isn’t feeling good. I need you to go into the front room and watch cartoons. I have to take care of him.”

“Okay.” My son went back into the front room without a quarrel.

While the surgeon worked on my dad, I called 911. Before long, a fire truck pulled up in the driveway. The ambulance would be there shortly, they explained, but until then, they had lifesaving equipment with them. I took Donnie to the neighbor’s house, and another neighbor, alerted by the fire truck, took my brother and me to the hospital, following the ambulance.

. . . The kitchen light glints off the dark depths of the lukewarm cup of coffee. It is the last cup of coffee my father will ever drink, but it can’t sit there forever. I swirl it around in the cup, but I have no desire to finish it. With a great effort, I head to the sink with it . . .

“I’m sorry,” the emergency room doctor said to my brother and me, no more than fifteen minutes after we arrived at the hospital. “We couldn’t save your dad.” There were discussions about funeral homes, organ donations, who to notify first; then we were allowed to go back to the room. 

My dad lay there, still wearing the sweatshirt and jeans he had been wearing when they brought him in. I took his hand, and it was not cold yet. He didn’t look much different than he had an hour before, yet something fundamental had changed here. Where there had been three people in the room—my dad, my brother, and me—now there were only two.  His strong will, his stubbornness so much like mine, his warmth, his presence—they were all gone, and there was no getting them back. My brother and I stood there for a moment, trying to take it in. “Dad,” I said to him under my breath. “Who do we have to push against now?”

. . . and pour the coffee out slowly, watching the last drops of the last cup of coffee swirl around the sink and down the drain.