Member-only story
Her Last Gift to Me Was Love
I was saved by her love and the healing sun
Her time of death was 6:31 a.m. She was thirty-three. I remember the time because I still believe that is the moment my father died too, although he managed to live another twenty years. I closed the book of poetry I had been reading out loud to her, and stood crying for a woman I had hated most of my life.
I had spent most of the last month sitting in the corner of a dingy, small town hospital room, today quietly crying since four thirty that morning, and had been here about twenty hours a day for the last several weeks, watching my stepmother die one ragged inch, and moan, at a time.
My father had called me at my work several months earlier, me trudging along as a reporter on a small, daily newspaper several hours from where I had been raised, and told me bluntly his wife was dying, it was all too much, would I please come home? This was the first time he had called me in ten years of five-minute phone calls, his birthday, holidays, and random Sundays when I had a beer and no excuse not to call him. It was always me calling him, every single one written down in a notebook in my desk, and never once did the bastard ever call me.
Never one birthday, never one Christmas call, never anything that mattered. My penance for being his son, my reward…
