Dread Level

 My dad is dying slowly in the living room. He's on twenty-four hour hospice care, and I pass his bed of sickness every time I get up for a meal or to refill my coffee. There's nothing particularly to do but wet his lips and administer doses of morphine. 

Somehow, my brain has managed to normalize the situation. At some point, it sprang out of the gear of crisis mode, and I started to think about other things and pick up abandoned lines of thought. 

"[W]hen he was ill," as Hugh MacDiarmid writes in a hauntingly confessional poem about his son, "I could not confine myself to his bedside." He admits that he "longer for [his] wide range of interests again." 

As did I. And so, I wandered off. I got my coffee and read some Robert Merton. I came out into the living room with a volume of Anthony Grafton under my arm, thinking I would read that. 

But at a certain point, dad started to stir for the first time in days. He smiled. He said "Hi Boon"—using his pet name for me from childhood. I stroked his hand. The whole family gathered around. He coughed. 

And all at once Anthony Grafton and Robert Merton fell away from me. 

"[A]ll slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller, further and further away," as Tomas Tranströmer wrote (Robertson trans.).

My universe shrank to the size of dad's next heart beat and his next ragged breath.

In short, I did what MacDiarmid confessed that he could not. 

I "sank without another care / To that dread level of nothing but life itself," as MacDiarmid puts it—sitting next to dad and just counting his breaths—experiencing a brief panic every time there was a pause between them.