Short Story by L. Keith
There’s a saying that you should always wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident. I’d like to add to it. You should never answer the phone when wearing your favorite pajama pants.
Once upon a time, I had a pair of polka-dot pajama pants that I loved. They were happy. You can’t be sad when wearing polka-dots. That might be a law somewhere. If it’s not, it should be. Of course, I say that knowing I threw my polka-dots away after a phone call tainted them forever.
My phone rang one night. I’d been expecting the call. My dad, a forty-nine-year-old man, had been going through some weird health problems and had fallen down that day. His wife took him to the hospital, and now they were calling to tell me what had happened.
After being in and out of the ER for weeks, I wasn’t expecting much. My dad complained of pain, but no one could locate the source. They began flagging him as a drug seeker, and the ordeal caused a lot of drama in our family. All this phone call would be was another dead-end, and I’d end up ignoring more of his calls because I didn’t want to be dragged into the middle of his marital issues anymore. It was an ongoing cycle, and I was over it.
I rolled my eyes when the name flashed on the screen and left the living room where my husband, three-year-old, and newborn twins were. I answered the phone with a laugh as I walked down the hallway off of the living room. I can’t remember what I was laughing at, but the sound lives forever in my head.
“Hello?” I giggled, looking down the hall to where my family waited.
My dad and his wife had me on speaker. I heard the wind and immediately knew they were smoking cigarettes in the hospital parking lot. I stopped in the doorway of the bathroom. The light had been left on, and the room was in disarray. Life with two new babies and a toddler meant my house was usually a disaster. That exact thought crossed my mind as I waited to hear what the doctor said. I glanced down at my pants, my favorite purple polka-dot pajamas, and that’s when my dad finally said the word I never expected.
“Cancer,” he said, his voice sounding off. Maybe it was the word that sounded all wrong.
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
For the past five years, that exchange has played out sporadically in my head while I’m doing the most mundane tasks. Where? Everywhere. It was so blunt. So final. Everyone knows the c-word is terrible, but paired with everywhere, and you know your life will never be the same.
And it wasn’t.
The first thing I lost was the pants. They felt tainted, as if they’d caused my dad’s diagnosis. My happy polka-dot pants killed. The thought makes me laugh now because it’s ridiculous, but I couldn’t bear seeing them at the time. All I could remember was looking down at my pants and hearing that awful word.
After the pants, I lost everything else. Life became a muddy pool of despair. What should have been days filled with excitement over the new babies became long minutes of anxiety while I waited for another phone call. I was constantly on edge, never knowing if he’d make it to the end of that day. Every morning I expected a missed call and to learn that he didn’t make it through the night. This went on for almost nine months.
My dad had always been this big man in stature and personality, and he’d be chiseled away. A stranger sat in his chair now, a quiet man with bones protruding from his skin. His eyes were sunken and sad. I’ve never admitted it out loud, but I hated being around him while he slowly died. I didn’t know that man. This person who couldn’t lift a pop can to his lips or hold a fork wasn’t the same man who tossed me into swimming pools or embarrassed me in public.
I lost my dad long before his last breath, and it’s hard to explain that to people. I lost him soon after the polka-dots but months before the funeral.
I didn’t go inside the funeral home. I sat in the car alone, unable to see him in his casket. Too much of him had already been taken from me. If I had to have a last memory of him, I wanted it to be in the hospital bed inside the Hospice facility, not in a box. You can’t erase that image, so I never wanted it created.
Cancer is the hardest on your loved ones. I’m sure it was difficult for the man in my dad’s clothes to sit in that chair, surrounded by his loved ones, and know that his moments with us were limited. I lost sleep over the thought of my dad living his last days knowing he’d never see my children grow up, but I still think about that, and he doesn’t have to. His pain is gone, and mine lingers like glitter.
Five years later, I can talk about him without the overwhelming flood of emotion, but I still cry it out quite often. It’s strange how pain and happiness can live in the same breath. Getting to that place took me a long time, but I’m here now.
My dad was the kind of man who could take a joke. He taught me to love through laughter. I try to remember that because laughing was impossible for so long. I struggled to see the joy in anything when someone so important was suddenly ripped away from me. I struggled to understand.
Honestly, I just struggled.
The pain felt never-ending. How could I learn one day to live in a world without him? It felt impossible, especially when I still pulled out my phone to call him occasionally. Nothing hurts worse than the sudden realization that someone else would answer that phone number. Because it wasn’t his anymore and hadn’t been for some time.
Then one day, the laughter came back. It surprised me. I had missed it so much but felt guilty for laughing when my dad was gone. I wanted his laughter, but I’d lost the sound.
Eventually, the laughter stuck around. That’s healing, I realize now. Healing takes time. It takes patience. You have to find what makes you happy even when you think you don’t deserve it.
My dad would want me to be happy. He’d want me to laugh. He’d want me to have my polka-dots back.
