A Measurable Loss

A Measurable Loss

by Tamuira Reid

I.

I lost my father in August 2017. My son lost his a year later. I’ve always hated summer. Maybe because I was born on a cold January morning and I’ve got winter running through my blood. Maybe because the warm days always felt suffocating to me, in their endlessness. Maybe because it’s when everyone dies.

My father’s death was not a quick one off but a slow easy spread, permeating every organ, every passageway, every out he had left. Death teased him. Came at him hard then relented just long enough to make its presence known. To him. To us. To everyone at home who had their health still, dotting the hills of the small valley town around us. It pushed and pulled until every last hope for a dignified ending was filibustered. Until the man who had somehow managed to avoid hospitals for the better part of his life knew, very clearly, it would be the last place he’d see. One wall, three curtains, and a gurney. The daughters and the wife. The younger by not much brother who had already seen how this would play out because after all, cancer is no stranger in the branches of the Reid family tree.

The surgeon was wheeled into my father’s room – his concerned, televised face, skyping from a nearby trauma unit – to break the news. All systems a fail. Nothing more to be done.

I couldn’t help but think that if he were younger, they’d do more. Try harder. Not give up.

I told the nurses that the man in the bed bared no resemblance to our real father. Our real father still hiked and lifted weights and hauled timber without getting winded. Our real father could annihilate The Times Sunday crossword in under thirty minutes. Our real father read Huck Finn at eight years-old and Steinbeck at ten. Our real father could do anything they could, except save his own life.

But in the end, cancer is cruel. It’s ugly and thoughtless. And it couldn’t give two shits about who you might’ve been before it got there.

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