Everyone dies differently. For my father, Breck, it’s drinking two brandies in front of the television with his bones locking up from hours on the recliner.
I watch him make his way down the long hallway when it’s time for him to retire for the evening. Tonight there is something different about him—he doesn't smile when I stand at the doorway, instead he's sitting at the edge of the bed, exhausted, his body broken from all the sales calls—on the road meeting clients, the cocktail parties, fishing trips; the decades before are with us. Even the sea has crushed him: the scuba dives, and being on his knees, praying to the wooden boards of a boat with all the prying, fitting, nailing, sanding, and painting. Eventually, when he couldn’t make the trip from the central valley to Bay Area, he allowed the San Francisco Bay Area Sea Scouts to pillage through his seventy-six foot boat. They took with them brass fittings, fishing poles, tackle boxes, generators, a dingy boat, life vests, just to name a few. In the months that followed, water began to seep inside the abandoned boat, and as the strength of the sea’s tongue pressed the boat to the sludge that had always lived underneath.
My hair smells like the fish (something I've grown up with). I watch my mother balance between the stove. Her voice punches its way through the grating scream of the exhaust fan that is unable to inhale the plumes of fish smoke and the burnt peas. I love you for trying. Her body is soft in her faded cotton sweats, her toes, always beautifully painted; her feet are two bouquets, just short from a dozen pink roses. She looks at me and says, I’m through with shopping and all she wants for her birthday is a rosary.
