Reedsy Prompt – Write a Story Inspired by a Piece of Music

Six Months

As I settled into a quiet corner in the Little Tart French Bakery, near Grant Park in Atlanta I felt somewhat elated as I surveyed the room and sipped my peppermint tea, my mask dangling from one ear. There were about a dozen others staring at laptops, chatting with friends, reading. It felt wonderful to be out of my apartment, in the company of strangers, after the past year of isolation. My table faced a set of windows that stretched the entire expanse of the room as a soft, steady rain fell outside. As I edited the technical document on my work laptop, jazz music played softly in the background. I had been working for a little over an hour when a familiar melody began to play. I was startled at the physical reaction I felt at the sound of it. My mind, against my will, slowly traveled back to a snowy evening in February of 2014.

I pulled up the “Kind of Blue” album by Miles Davis on my Spotify and let it play softly on the small speaker I’d placed on the nightstand by my father’s bed. It was about 11:00 p.m. on a Sunday night, in February, 2014, and my dad loved straight ahead jazz. Snow was falling outside of my brother Ethan’s home in central New Jersey at the rate of about an inch or so an hour. I sat at my father’s bedside, not fully comprehending what my sister-in-law Inga was trying to tell me.  Inga is a hospice nurse. She and my brother Tim, who is Ethan’s twin, arrived about noon today from Reading, PA. They intended to visit with my dad and then check into a nearby hotel this evening, but Inga felt they should stay the night. She said she wanted to keep an eye on my dad. 

In December, 2013, my father was given six to nine months to live. He was dying from stage three lung cancer. My brother James and I had arrived from Atlanta, the day before, Saturday, and my dad was wide awake! When I walked into his bedroom, he was sitting up in bed, alert. His eyes lit up and he cried out, “My girl!” I went to him and lay my head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around me. His face was clean shaven and he appeared to have had a fresh haircut. My brother Ethan and his wife Raquel were taking good care of him. I was there to help them with his care and planned to stay for at least a month. His skin was so soft and smooth. He was golden and gleaming as if he were filled with some inner light. He looked beautiful. I told him so. He smiled at me, glowing. We talked for a while, and then his words became harder to understand, garbled and it seemed he could hardly keep his eyes open. I said, 

“It’s ok, rest now. Sleep well and we’ll talk tomorrow. We have plenty of time to catch up. I’ll be here at least a month.” 

He smiled a wistful smile, squeezed my hand and mouthed the words “I love you.” 

I hadn’t seen my dad in two years, but we had talked often. I tried to check in with him at least once a week. It hadn’t always been this way between us. My relationship with my father had been.... complicated. I began to rebuild my bond with him about a year before he was diagnosed. 

I am the oldest of eight children (seven living.) I was the only girl for 15 years and then my baby sister Sara was born. My mom called us her book ends. My dad loved his boys and spent a lot of time with them. Up until I was about ten or eleven, I was included. I was a tomboy who loved to watch and play baseball, basketball and football. My dad and I watched the various games together and he taught me how to throw a perfect spiral with the football.

I was an avid reader and a few times a month my dad and I would spend Saturday afternoons at either the library in Neptune, NJ or at the larger Monmouth County Library in Shrewsbury, NJ. It felt nice to have some father/daughter time together and we would talk. He was the one who took me to our local bank when I started earning money babysitting and helped me open my first savings account. He encouraged me and cheered me on when I got my first “real” job as a camp counselor at 14. 

My dad was one of just a handful of black students in his high school class in Derry, PA, but was elected Student Body President of his senior class. Popular, he went on to attend Central State University in Ohio on a football scholarship. A family tragedy caused his college career to be cut short. This was just one of several heartbreaking events in his life, that I knew had changed him forever. I wish I had known the man he would have been, if life had been more kind to him.

He and his older brother, Joe lost their mother, Eleanor when my father was just four years old and Joe was 12. Eleanor taught piano but was a sickly woman. She had had more than six miscarriages and lost two children at a very young age before my father was born. She suffered from Lupus and ultimately died of Lupus Nephritis in 1943. The two boys were raised by their father William Henry and his sister Jesse. My father’s paternal grandmother, Jenny also helped out with his care. 

From what I understand, Joe was rebellious from an early age. My family lived in the mountains of Ligonier, PA, having migrated there from Rappahannock, VA in the late 1800’s. They were farmers and purchased approximately 50 acres of land in the area, built a large farmhouse on the property and grew crops on their land. They established a successful market in Ligonier. William Henry left the family business after marrying Eleanor and became a coal miner to support his new family. It seems Joe was disobedient to his mother and difficult to manage from a young age. His bad behavior escalated after his mother’s death. He began to associate with a rowdy crowd and began getting into trouble, committing break-ins and petty theft. He was sent to reform school. This all took place in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. His behavior brought much shame to the family as there were only a few families of color in that sparsely populated area. By the time Joe reached his early twenties he had been in and out of jail for a variety of infractions, until one night he decided to take part in an armed robbery of the foreman of a brick company in Latrobe, PA. The foreman was in the process of delivering the payroll to the brick company when he was accosted by Joe and his two white accomplices. The foreman was shot twice and died several hours later in the hospital. Joe was believed to be the triggerman and after a brief trial, was sentenced to death by electric chair. My father was in high school when this ordeal began and in college on a football scholarship when his brother was put to death. Whenever my dad spoke of these events, he did so with great sorrow, shame and regret. There may have been a tinge of some other emotion as well. Was it, resentment? My dad told us how hard his father worked and how he did all he could to try to turn Joe around. He spent so much of his inheritance on his eldest son’s defense and lawyers over the years that there was very little money left for my father or his college education. He always seemed a little confused about his true feelings for Joe, which was understandable. 

Attending Central State College in Ohio, he lost his football scholarship when news of the conviction got out. Feeling ostracized, and unable to pay for his college education, he dropped out and joined the army. It was during his stint in the army that he met my mother. After marriage they settled in Long Branch, NJ and when I was about nine, they purchased a modest split-level home in a nice middle-class neighborhood in Neptune, NJ. My mother was a stay at home mom, all of us children had bikes and plenty of toys. We were well cared for, quite an accomplishment for a black man at that time.

But there were secrets in my father’s past that none of us children knew about then. Those secrets often caused an underlying tension in our household that often rose to the boiling point, causing conflict, arguments and screaming matches between my parents. These were the things I thought about in February 2014 and couldn’t help but re-visit as I watched the rain fall quietly to the pavement outside The Little Tart coffee shop as my father’s jazz played softly in the background. 

My dad slept through the rest of the day Saturday and only had a few waking hours on Sunday. Inga took responsibility for administering medication and keeping him comfortable. His assigned nurse was off until Monday. All of my siblings were there at Ethan’s by happenstance, except for one brother Joe who was in Atlanta. 

Around midnight, I went to bed. Inga said she’d wake me if anything changed. My sister Sara and I slept in the bedroom right next to my dad’s. There were three bedrooms on this, the second floor of Ethan’s home. He and his wife slept in the remaining bedroom and the rest of my brothers were scattered throughout the downstairs family room and basement on sofas and pull out couches.  We did not plan to all be here together, but the snowstorm had caused several of my siblings to turn around after starting out for home. I settled in for the night.

Around 2:00 a.m. Monday morning Inga woke Sara and I with an urgent whisper saying, “Hurry, it’s happening now! ‘Huh?’ I thought. ‘What’s happening now? Surely, he wasn’t dying! He had at least six more months to live.” I grabbed my robe and Sara and I quickly followed Inga. My brothers, James, Timothy and Ethan and their wives, Inga and Raquel stood in a semi-circle at the foot of the bed. Sara found her way to the other side of the bed and took my father’s hand. Jason, the youngest boy,  stood next to her. I took my father’s other hand, standing on the side of the bed closest to the doorway. I stared at him in disbelief. The beautiful golden complexion of the previous day had been replaced by a greyish ashen tone to his skin. Where his cheeks had a warm fullness to them just a few hours ago, his eyes were now sunken and his cheeks drawn and pale. His eyes were closed and I felt as if all the air was being sucked from the room. Minutes passed and everyone but me was crying. Inga, said, “He’s fighting, tell him its ok. Tell him you will be okay.” I looked around the room as my siblings spoke those words, to put him at ease. I said them too, but my mind screamed, ‘Not yet! No! Not yet! I need more time! I have six months.”  I held my father’s hand and stroked it softly. He was a complex man with many layers and hidden grief and pain he could not share and he was taking his last breaths. The room felt as if it were moving, the air was electric and active. And then something happened that shocked us all. My father raised his head from his pillow, opened his eyes and said softly, “I love you all.” 

He laid his head back onto his pillow, closed his eyes and the room was still, quiet and I knew he was gone. 

This was the saddest, most fascinating, terrible, beautiful, awful, almost supernatural thing I have ever experienced, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. His life force left us actively, dramatically just as he had lived. He was a man I loved but didn’t know well or fully understand.

The rain had stopped falling in Atlanta, replaced instead by salty tears that slipped from the corners of my eyes, and down my cheeks. The final notes of “Kind of Blue” played on and I reflected on how in the years that have passed since his death, I’ve come to know myself more intimately and understand how my relationship with him impacted decisions I’ve made throughout my life. Some good, others not so much. No matter where our relationships with our parents take us over the course of our lifetimes, at the end, when all is said and done, all you are left with is the love.