Vigil For My Father, John J. Brick

Ghosts demand as much of your time as we, your progeny, do. We crowd around the bed but they crowd even closer. They follow you into sleep through your trembling eyelids, lodge themselves in your mind like sparrows nested in a high elm. Your hands float above the sheets and straps, tracing patterns in the air, hesitant, delicate patterns as if you were shaping a haircut or molding soft clay into an image of something old and dear. When you cough and wake yourself, you drag out fragments of your dream and hurl them at us, so confident these ghost events are the real life you are living. It is already evening. The drapes are pulled shut against the cold light of November stars. The room shines in the glare of flat white lights against beige walls. You still drift in and out of sleep, wake, wonder where you are and fumble with the sheets, and then go back to sleep where everything you dream makes perfect sense. Last night, I told you stories from my childhood shaped by your loving care. All the time, you smiled up at the ceiling. Then, your head turned to my side. Your pale blue eyes, watery and wrinkled, saw me. 'We have a lifetime of memories, Ray.' Suddenly, memory had changed me, the son, into Ray, the friend. Who can tell why your mind needed that friendship again? 'I'm sleeping at Ray Milski's, ' you told the nurse as she tied your hands to the side of the bed. And all this will be repeated tonight, and will be repeated tomorrow, and again the next day, and the next. What else is there to do but talk over the past, since the future for us is shrinking, all our delight squeezed into the small spaces of the present.