An Empty Room

Holly and Andrew picked me up at the airport. I hadn’t seen Holly in seven years; Andrew in less than 24-hours, me having made the reverse trip only the previous night. It was a long ride. Navigating twisting, bumpy roads through the middle of the cold New Hampshire night. Holly was driving. We spent much of the time catching up, talking ...about Holly and Steve’s new farm. Keeping a sense of levity to the drive and avoiding the subject of the destination: the hospice in Dover where my father’s body lay.

I tried to warn Holly about the cop we blew past in Barrington, but he got us. As they always do, the blue and red lights atop his cruiser exploded in the darkness as the officer walked slowly over and directed his flashlight at the three of us. He could see Holly was trembling and he amiably reassured her everything was OK; she wasn’t getting a ticket. He said with a chuckle, “It’s not like you’ve got a body in the trunk.”

Holly started to cry. “But we’re going to see one,” she managed to say. The officer apologized, reassured her again that she wasn’t in trouble, expedited his paperwork, and let us go. We laughed about it as we drove on, Holly’s mother having gotten pulled over right outside my dad’s house only the night before. I guess none of us were using all of our faculties of late. Trying to relay my dad’s prognosis to my wife a few weeks prior over my cell phone, I unwittingly shoplifted a box of ginger snaps from a Hannaford’s grocery store.

We arrived at the hospice and walked to the door. It was that time of night when senses are sharpened by fatigue or perhaps the surreal nature of the moment had something to do with it. The yellow cast of the sodium streetlights gave a razor’s edge to every shadow. The air was palpably damp with settling dew. The crunch of every pebble was audible beneath our feet.

We were shown to his room. Holly decided to wait outside while Andrew and I went in. I noticed small, domestic things in the room: the television in its cabinet, a damp pizza box in the trash, a refrigerator. I would later learn from my stepmother the tragicomic pathos to the details of my father’s actual passing. Her bumping the TV remote as he took his last breath and accidentally switching on an inane sitcom. Dad would’ve found it all hilarious, no doubt.

The room was deafeningly quiet.

Of course, there’s the old saying that you can feel when another person is in a darkened room with you. There’s an almost imperceptible electric tang to the very air letting your primitive, caveman brain know instinctually that you’re not alone. No such current here.

My father was still in his hospital johnnie, a plastic bracelet around his wrist. The bedclothes were neatly pulled up to his chest. His right arm folded across him over the covers. His mouth was slightly opened. It looked nothing like him. He hadn’t looked like himself when I saw him in the hospital just days before. Shaved head, a dramatic loss in weight, his skin drooping from him with a greenish-yellow tint.

I’ve seen dead bodies before. My job in the Air Force was that of mortuary officer. Rationally, experientially, I knew what to expect, but now somehow didn’t. I had forgotten all the training, had mislaid the half dozen fellow airmen I had boxed up and shipped home. This was all new.

I looked over at Andrew as he gazed at our father with his pensive, and almost always stoic expression. He is the oldest of my half-brothers, born when I was eighteen and my mind was on college and everywhere other than home. Of all my siblings—of any of my family, really—he is the most like me. Quiet, laconic, introspective, independent. I was suddenly brought back to him as an infant in my lanky, teenage arms and I gazing dumbfounded at the first person I could call brother. Fast forward twenty years and a bearded, silent bear of a man stands with me as we quietly ply our combined sixty years of life experience to try and make sense of it. That this corpse in this bed in this quiet room could be our father.

Like I said, I’ve seen dead bodies before. I know what to expect. They’re cold, still, and pliable as concrete. As I bent to kiss his forehead I knew what it was going to be like. And how many times had I kissed my father? Enough times to memorize and squirrel away in my brain forever the toughened yet soft feel of his skin, the sounds he made as he breathed or cleared his throat, his combination of smells from tobacco and Scotch to damp wool and denim. Kissing his forehead now was like kissing a leather covered bowling ball.

And at that moment I knew: he wasn’t there.

“Goodbye, dad,” I said and as I straightened, Andrew leaned in and did the same. A moment passed and I looked at my brother. “Let’s go,” I said.

Back in the parking lot the three of us stopped to listen to the high-pitched yelp and howl of a coyote somewhere in the blackened trees. Whether it was my dad’s spirit telling us to pause a moment and take in the beauty of the forest or whether it was a random happenstance, bereft of all symbolic meaning, who could say? We climbed into the car and away we drove.

I thanked them for taking me there. I said that I needed it. Somehow something would’ve felt left undone had we not gone there that night. But I said I felt like it had been a wasted trip in a way—a fool’s errand to drive all that way to see an empty room. Knowing how animated, joyful, and full of life my dad had been, I was certain he wasn’t there. Holly and Andrew agreed.

I would later try to convey this feeling to my aunts the next day. Their wide eyes told me I hadn’t been quite clear when I said, “He wasn’t there.” Thinking, of course, that his remains had been moved without their knowing. I guess that’s why they’re called ‘remains’. They’re what remains when a person is transformed into the collected treasure of his or her joy, triumph, sorrow, hard work and, most certainly, love. It’s what’s left behind for the survivors. Something not my father alone and quiet in an empty room.