You posed with your arms slung over each other’s shoulders, holding fish in your free hands with a dock in the background.

I never knew my own father. But yours? He was a father you were close to, a father who would listen, who’d be there, an ‘old man’ who would tell you what’s what but in a kind way. A father who took you out for a damned fine steak on your eighteenth birthday because you were a man and steak is what men eat. A man who stood you a drink as if you were an old friend.

Sister Macklin said he’d hang on for the rest of the afternoon and a can of warm pop and a questionable sandwich of dried out white bread and a slice of ham was all the respite you were given. The generators had failed. The corridors were sweltering. Ices  melted in the freezer. The tea and coffee machines weren’t working, and though it was a hot day everything you touched was cold. I tried to take your hand but you turned to me and said, “No.”

We’d only just pulled the tabs on the warm Cokes. We’d only just taken one horrifying bite from the sandwich when Sister Macklin appeared, her black hair rolled under her white nurse’s cap, her forehead sweating from doing the flights of stairs and the return trip awaiting us as we had to navigate the stairwells lit by dim evacuation lights to the seventh floor, all so we could look upon a man who was no longer there. The dying leave us breathless.

You entered the room. The sister, perhaps to spare you or give you a moment that is so important between a father and son – not between a father and son and the son’s boyfriend – was right out of Hamlet.

You had to go in alone. You had to cradle the truth in your arms, tilting the head this way and that, saying nothing but mouthing pain none the less.

You had to be told the truth of his demise straight from his spirit. I felt as if you’d walked into the fog on a battlement and a horrible truth was about to be revealed to you. That’s all it was. The truth. It wasn’t horrible. It just was the truth.

I never told you that just before you left his room and stood talking in a low voice to the sister, I went to him and opened one of his eyes and I was the last thing he saw or didn’t see. He probably didn’t see me. If he had, I would have felt I violated your relationship with him.

The eye did not look at me as much as through me. I asked his forgiveness but none was forthcoming. How could it? He’d said all he had to say during his life. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was just acceptance. The way he accepted his own death. The way he believed he would never see a grandchild of his own. It was just a loneliness. Isolation. Living with so many ends unanswered for, so many threads that could not be neatly tied up into a neat conclusion he dreamed of knowing in his isolation. It was abandonment. You were there, but no matter how close you stood, leaning over him the night before so he could whisper secrets in your ear, he was abandoned. And he abandoned you because that’s the way death leaves things.

His face had collapsed in on itself, his false teeth taken out for mercy’s sake, and the round O of his mouth caked with what looked like dried oatmeal but is the crap that comes out of the mouths of the dying.

I looked in that one eye. It wasn’t seeing anything. It was just there, staring. But as we climbed up the fourteen staircases, sixteen if you count the fact the cafeteria is in the basement, I heard you growing short of breath, huffing, and then the sound of a sob, your shoulders going up, and your hand gripping the stair rail. I thought, “Don’t hold back on my account. Don’t show me your grief if you aren’t.” I was the jealous lover that Keith Douglas describes in his poem about the dead Panzer man in the burned out tank. Vergissmeinnicht. I don’t remember the lines and even if I did you would hate me for thinking of them.

I wished we’d all gone fishing together. I wanted more than anything to have been a better part of your life. I could see what I had missed, what I could never understand.  Long conversations. Steak on my eighteenth birthday. The advice poured shot by shot at the kitchen table.

And as you stood there weeping into your hand, standing like a shadow over the body of your father, I could picture you and me together, maybe not in the past but someday, somewhere, maybe if I had kid of our own, and we’d be standing there with our arms around each other’s shoulder, the little guy proudly holding up the undersized fish we caught and should have thrown back, and some guy hanging around the dock we hand our camera to and hearing him say, “Smile” and clicking the shutter because it all is over in the blink of an eye. And what we fail to love or be loved by makes us see what we have or should have had, or ought to hold on to even though it is slippery and it fought for its life on the end of a thin line. And as an afterthought, after the hook is removed from the fish’s mouth, you persuade the child that all things deserve the lives they have struggled to live. You lie flat on your stomach and lower your hands over the side of the dock. The fish is inanimate. It stares at the sky. And then, to the boy’s amazement and yours, its opens and closes a gill as it is submerged, its tail awakens, and it disappears into depths we will never completely understand.

Bruce Meyer is author of sixty-four books of poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and non-fiction and has seven more books forthcoming in the next three years. His stories have won or been short-listed for numerous international prizes. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.