The Long Goodbye

The machines keep count of something— not life exactly, more like the argument life makes against the silence. My father has become an exercise in subtraction. First the car keys. Then the stairs. Then the name of the street he lived on for forty years, which he now calls "the one with the tree"— and he's right, there is a tree, and maybe that's enough to navigate a world that's folding up its map. The nurses call it stages, as if dying were a rocket and we should enjoy the view on the way down. I hold his hand. It weighs nothing now— a sparrow's handful, a thing the wind could take if the window were open. But his grip— when it comes, in those moments between one country and the next— his grip says: I'm not lost. I'm just further ahead. Wait for me there, by the one with the tree.