An Enlarged Heart

I’m still thinking about my dad. About that one morning he called a few years ago. It was about 8 a.m., a little earlier maybe. Teresa and I were both awake, enjoying a cuddle in our warm bed. A warm bed in a cold room, there’s nothing better. My dad calls and tells me that his best friend of recent months, Colin, died yesterday. Every morning, my dad would make his way from his apartment in the assisted living place that he was in at the time, knock on Colin’s door, and they'd walk together to breakfast in another part of the building.

That day , when he knocked on the door, there was no reply. He went into the room, and Colin was still in bed. Still. Motionless. My dad told me how Colin’s hand was cold. I can see my dad reaching out and touching the back of his hand to Colin’s, needing something real to match what he already knows, to stop him running in the wrong direction inside. My dad turned ninety that year. Finding someone dead when you are ninety is a whole lot different than finding someone dead when you are my age, or fifty, sixty, seventy even. At ninety, a dead body has got to be more of a mirror. A river.

Death, a dead body, must be more of a river at ninety. I can see my dad—his name is Jacques (everyone calls him Jack or Jakes)—I can see him sitting next to Colin’s body, not Colin, but Colin’s body, and being carried by the river’s current into his own mortality. He told me an interesting thing. After he felt Colin’s hand, and it was cold, he said something like, “His stomach was still warm, though. He must have died later in the night. Maybe four or five in the morning.”

When I think of my dad’s old, dry hand with its parchment skin reaching out to Colin’s belly and settling on those last moments of warmth—the love and tenderness of that moment. I feel full. Right now. I wonder if Colin was still in the room. Kinda like how I check around my seat at the movies or my gym locker before I leave, you know, to make sure I’ve got everything. I mean, I know I’ve got everything, but it’s always good to check, just in case. Colin’s almost out of the door, as it were.

He’s on his way toward the Light tunnel, and he turns to check that he hasn’t left anything. He looks down to his bed and his body, and my dad is sitting there, a hand resting on Colin’s still warm belly—well his body’s belly. And he blesses my father. A blessing from the other side, well, that’s a whole different thing.

I listened to my father on the phone. He sounded pretty solid, a little worried about a trip to the hospital the next day for some heart work—analysis, tests, electrical impulses of some kind. Last month they told him that he has an enlarged heart. I had to laugh. “We’ve known that all along!” I said, and he laughed too.