Life After Yes by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

Author:Aidan Donnelley Rowley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

I did shave my legs the morning of January twelfth. My twenty-seventh birthday. The day of Dad’s memorial service. I’m not sure why. We were all at Bird Lake and I decided to shower in Mom and Dad’s bathroom in our cabin. Michael and I have our own bathroom, but still, Mom didn’t say anything when I asked to use theirs. Now, hers. Just that there was an extra towel on the hook behind the door.

So there I sat, holed up in the tiny bathroom Dad never finished remodeling, naked, at the bottom of the bathtub, dragging cheap pink plastic over furry white legs. Hot water sprayed from the old showerhead, pelting my back. Dad’s bottle of Head & Shoulders rested on the edge of the basin; Mom hadn’t thrown it out yet. But then again it had been only a couple months since he died and I figured this shampoo’s days were numbered. Dad was the only one with dandruff. And Mom wasn’t like those other widows profiled on the morning shows, the ones who left everything the way it was before their husbands died, who refused to throw away the half-eaten bag of potato chips, or the toothbrush that would never be used again.

As the room steamed up and the mirror above the sink fogged, something became clear to me. This wasn’t how I pictured the end.

No one’s supposed to imagine her parents’ decline. But I did. Maybe it’s the realist in me. Maybe it’s that Dad was never afraid to talk to us about mortality, to explain the limp and lifeless body of a young bird on our front porch, or the lineup of glass-eyed trout in the rickety old icehouse. Maybe it was that goddamned trusts and estates seminar in law school where our bow tie–clad professor pummeled us with prudence: It’s never too early to plan for death.

Whatever the cause, I thought about these things. About losing Mom and Dad. I pictured Dad, an extraordinary man, exiting this world the ordinary way. I envisioned the generic grays of a hospital room, a quiet good-bye punctuated by faint rumblings of some kind of medical machine. I even imagined living the euthanasia debate, arguing with Mom and Michael over whether Dad would want to live like this, prisoner to exactly the kind of machines he despised and knew intimately from his decades as a doctor. I envisioned debating whether to bury or burn, whether my dear dad would prefer to spend eternity in a box in the earth under a pricey slab of stone or scattered over the lake he loved.

But it didn’t happen like this. I never got that hospital room. I never got to see the big man who was my father cloaked in a paper-thin gown. And we never got a body. Or ashes.

A timely pragmatist, Mom embraced the benefit of having no body or ashes: no logistical restraints. “Well, we can do it anywhere then,” she said of the service. “He’d want it at the lake.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.