Missing the father who was, and who would have been.

By ROBERT MAYS III
news@columbiamissourian.com

EDITOR’S NOTE: Robert Mays III wrote this essay earlier this year, after a visit home to Chicago to be with his father, who was being treated for terminal brain cancer. Mays, who just completed his junior year at MU, is a sports writer at the Columbia Missourian.

I’m sitting on a stool next to my father’s hospital chair. The nurse comes in to switch his IV — a bag of saline followed by a $25,000 dose of poison. She’ll be back in a half hour, she says. We nod. We’ve done this before.

Five minutes of safe, sports-centered small talk later he falls asleep. His chair is reclined, and his Missouri State baseball cap is pulled down over his eyes. He always wears a hat now. The scar is several inches long and indented into the skin left bare by hours of radiation. The hair transplant plugs in the back, once hidden, form a visible pattern. Vanity does not go missing even in the face of mortality.

I’m jealous that he can sleep. After seven hours in this hospital and three cups of coffee, I can’t even sit still. I look at the clock and see that it’s almost 4 p.m. I had hoped we’d miss rush hour. But now the drive home that should take an hour will take three. How hard is it to get the paperwork right? He’s in here every friggin’ week. The stool gets even more uncomfortable. My back hurts. I miss my body of even two years ago. I was so much younger then.

I shift my gaze back to the large man in the chair next to me. I miss feeling small while he’s around. A body that often hovered around 270 pounds has dwindled by nearly 50. I weigh as much as he does now. My mother cooks when she’s stressed. I eat when I am. The last six months have brought 20 pounds.

I focus on his face. He has a full beard now. For as long as I can remember, he had worn a goatee. He can’t shave because of the blood-thinners. Before he lost his hair it was mostly a deep black. The beard is almost all gray. He opens his eyes. Even that looks draining. I ask if he feels OK. Just tired, he responds. He always is now.

The things I miss are the things I thought I never would. I miss crying. It’s been a month since I last went with him to the hospital. I haven’t cried since a little before then. I did my best to stop myself while he was around. He needs to know I’m not afraid. I fear I’ve trained myself too well.

The last time was this past Christmas. We were watching basketball, and he was sitting in the leather recliner in my grandfather’s living room. I went and kneeled next to him. Resting my head on his chest, I wrapped my arms around his ever-thinning torso.

I thought about Christmases past. My dad loves Christmas. He bought our presents every year. And every year he knew exactly what we wanted. A list was merely a formality. I can’t recall a Christmas when my favorite gift wasn’t one I’d ask for but rather one he surprised me with.

But in 2007, he started a new job, selling wine for a Napa Valley winery. For the nine years before, he had been home, taking care of us while my mom ran an insurance agency. Now he no longer had time to be both salesman and Santa Claus. My mother, bravely and reluctantly, stepped into the large gift-giving shadow that remained. When Christmas morning came that year, everyone, especially my mom, knew that something was off. She said that from now on, Dad would be Santa. I miss looking forward to the future.

I lay there, my head on his chest, and I wept. I held my ground, arms around him, for nearly an hour. It was almost 7 o’clock, and I knew the night would be over soon. Eventually it was time to leave and time to concede. I let go.

There have been tears since then. But there’s never a gasp. A cry is nothing without the gasp. Without the gasp there is still a rhythm to my breathing. There is no break in my stride. But the gasp stops me where I stand. It alters the inertia of days pushed forward by deadlines, applications and rubrics. But the inertia rules of late. Letting go sometimes means not being able to hold back on.

The things I miss are the things too small to notice. I miss his voice. It was assertive and unassailably confident. It was uniquely malleable and always perfectly delivered. His words were always cryptic and often sparse. He had mastered tone and inflection.

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