by Lisa K. Buchanan

After an absence of twenty-nine years, my mother walks into my father’s living room without knocking. She looks around and sniffs. His apartment doesn’t compare to the homes they shared, but she is not about to apron up and attack the faucet crud. In her bridal skirt suit from 1944, she trills her piano fingers on his pink scalp, startling him from the televised golf game he’s been snooze-watching. He reaches for his cane, but she’s quicker, baton-twirling it overhead. Dad spit-shines his wingtips, down and up with a full head of hair and a spine made of rubber. I’m in the kitchen, visiting, mid-pumpernickel with egg salad, but my parents ignore me, as if I don’t exist. And, really, I don’t, because they’re happier than I’ve ever seen them. Newlyweds again, they have never suffered a stillbirth. My mother has never been lonely during the day or wondered about my father’s pretty office manager; she has never mourned a suicidal brother; has never become diabetic or been threatened with amputation or gone swollen and lopsided and polecat mean. My father has never had his sternum sawed open or spent a holiday alone or outlived his closest friends. They walk through the door without bothering to open it, and my father’s passing has been surprisingly sweet.

OR

From a distance of thirteen-hundred miles, there is little I can do when my ninety-three-year-old father’s driver’s license is renewed, he refuses a hearing aid, his caregiver insists she feels safe in the passenger seat, and the police officer who stopped him for speeding chooses not to cite him. Driving through a wide intersection, Dad doesn’t hear the urgent honking of the car hurtling toward him on a red light. He sustains thirty-two fractures, six shattered teeth, multiple organ failures, and a masticated leg. By the time I arrive, his caregiver, guardian to her six-year- old nephew, has died. The driver of the other car is in critical condition, and the child who had dutifully walked her bike in the crosswalk will never walk again. During my father’s decreasing intervals of consciousness, the carnage is the unmerciful subject of his final attempts to speak.

OR

Dad makes friends in the apartment complex and watches the kids play in the pool. Like his own father at ninety-five, he’s even-tempered and quick to laugh. Like his own father, he complains of a headache one afternoon and lays down for his final nap, his youngest at his side.

OR

Three months after the pacemaker is implanted, my father has a massive stroke. In the nursing facility, he is moved from the chair to the bed and back to the chair in precisely the existence he has said, in his advance directives, he does not want. He cannot eat with a spoon or get out of bed or visit the bathroom on his own. An hour’s drive in the sunshine is out of the question. His dementia renders him ineligible for an assisted farewell and his pacemaker keeps his heart beating.

OR

In celebration of my father’s ninety-fourth birthday, we traverse two major airports and a propeller plane to reach his rural hometown where the population is about seventy-two hundred as it was during his youth. There’s now a road where his house once stood, next to the Pentecostals who made a holy racket (“Phyllis and Zelpha, they got the pow’r.”) and retained their outhouse, despite the offer of a free toilet. The railroad tracks and potato fields are gone, but one evening, after a moose sighting on a snowy road, Dad’s fireside stories are unusually nuanced, as if his younger self has paid a visit. Days later, his funeral is attended by the same seventeen family members who just had dinner with us.

OR

In military photos, my handsome father at age thirty has a somber gaze and small, shapely, clarinet-trained lips. When he jumps over the side of a boat to retrieve a wounded buddy, a bullet slices through his throat. Still, eight years later, I am born to a teenage mom and relinquished for adoption, but end up with different parents—maybe a father with a gambling addiction or a temper or a marriage he hoped to save by agreeing to adopt.

Consequently, I miss out on a balding, soft-spoken dad who collects wheat pennies, sings in the choir, and wears cardigan sweaters; a soap-scented dad who props an oversized fairy-tale book on his belly and reads aloud, my head on his shoulder. I miss out on a dad who has a story for every keepsake he passes down; a dad who tells me he loves me, even if I’ve called during the Lawrence Welk Show.

OR

Every week, my father and his caregiver drive fifty miles to have lunch at a bowling alley with a view of the mountains. Also on his joy list at ninety-nine are vintage cowboy westerns, select tv preachers, and chocolate-covered peanut butter cups. Sometimes he threatens to kill himself or torch his apartment building. Sometimes he sings until his throat is raw. And then, one Tuesday at 1:14 a.m., despite the imaginings with which I’d attempted to prepare myself, my phone rings and I’ve lost him for the last time.