We learn to live with death the same way we read by firelight—slowly, painfully, beautifully.
No one prepares you for the feeling of loving something that Death has touched.
I sit here looking around his cabin—now mine. The air smells of pine sap, old smoke, and the faint tang of whiskey soaked into the floorboards. Dust floats through the thin light that leaks between the curtains. Each corner is stacked with books—subjects as varied as anatomy and jazz theory. A shelf of vinyl lines the far wall: Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson. Then, tucked behind them, a few heavy metal records—Sabbath, Maiden, Priest. My father, it seems, was a closet metalhead. I smile at that. Maybe I inherited more from him than just a pulse: the music, the books, the need to understand the noise inside.
Warmth slides down my cheeks before I realize I’m crying. The tears catch the scent of dust and woodsmoke, grounding me. I never knew him growing up. He and my mother had a moment in their teens—one of those sparks people mistake for destiny before life smothers it with reason. She was in law school; he was home on leave from the Army. They met at a party through a mutual friend, made promises under a drunk moon, and a week later, he shipped out. Nine months later—technically ten, if you’re counting the way we do in obstetrics—I arrived.
I became a doctor partly to make sense of what my mother wouldn’t talk about: biology, infection, the way life insists on being messy no matter how sterile you keep your hands. That’s where I met my father—though I didn’t know it then.
He came into the ER after an accident. I was covering trauma, running late for my weekly lunch with Mom. She’s a federal judge now, but every Thursday we make time—just an hour to remember we’re still mother and daughter, not just professionals orbiting duty.
When I finally reached the ER, Mom was already there. She’d come looking for me, irritation etched into her face. But as I began to explain, she froze. Her gaze fixed on the patient lying in bed—multiple fractures, head laceration, vitals unstable but holding. The antiseptic smell and hum of monitors felt suddenly foreign, like I’d stepped out of my own body.
“Mom?” I asked.
She stepped closer to the bed. Her hand rose to her mouth, and for the first time in my life, I saw her cry. Real tears—silent, unstoppable. She reached out, caressed the man’s forehead, her fingers trembling like someone touching a ghost.
“Mom, what’s going on? Do you know him?”
She didn’t answer. Just kept tracing the lines of his face, as if memory might come alive under her touch.
“Mom!”
Finally, she turned toward me, her voice steady but low.
“He’s your father.”
Then she pulled a chair to his bedside, sat down, and called her clerk to clear her docket.
My chest tightened. My legs went weak. I recognized the physiology even as it overtook me—tachycardia, dizziness, shallow breath. I nearly hit the floor before someone caught me.
Carol—my charge nurse, my right hand for ten years. A skinny little thing, but deceptively strong.
We weren’t just colleagues. We were friends.
“Sue, what’s going on?” she asked, her voice sharp with command. I heard her barking orders, but the words blurred into static. The next thing I knew, I was staring at a white ceiling, the steady beep of a monitor tracing the edge of my humiliation.
I tried to sit up—irritated beyond measure—but Carol pushed me back down with one hand. For such a small woman, she was a brick wall.
“Pilates?” I asked, breathless, trying to find my bearings.
She grinned, pouring me a cup of water. “The Judge filled me in. Your dad’s a hottie, by the way. Banged up and all.”
I snorted. Of course, she’d say something like that. That was Carol—always trying to make me laugh when she knew I was about to unravel. The water tasted metallic from the cup, cold against the desert of my throat.
She stood beside me, one hand resting over mine, thumb tracing small circles like she was smoothing out the tremors beneath my skin. Neither of us spoke for a while. The monitors filled the silence. Somewhere down the hall, a code was called, and the world kept spinning as if mine hadn’t just tilted off its axis.
After a few minutes, I was steady enough to stand. Carol and I walked back to my father’s room. The corridor smelled faintly of disinfectant and rain-soaked concrete from the ambulance bay. Mom sat beside his bed, holding his hand. The look on her face—devastation mixed with fierce worry—nearly broke me. When she saw me, she stood and came toward me, wrapping me in a soft and trembling hug.
“You okay? I know it’s a lot,” she said.
“It must’ve been one hell of a week,” I quipped.
To my surprise, she roared with laughter—real, unrestrained laughter. I didn’t think it was funny, but she lost it in the middle of the ER.
“It was, actually,” she said, still smiling. “We made you.”
Her eyes drifted off somewhere far beyond the fluorescent lights. It’s strange how memory works—how it lets you step back in time, not just to see it, but to feel it, every heartbeat replaying as if the past were still happening right now.
I had two years with him. Two years I’ll never trade for anything. I’d never seen my mother happier. Watching them together, I understood their brief story hadn’t been some teenage fling—it was a spark that waited decades to breathe again. For a while, it felt like the world had given us a second chance.
Then the disease came, and everything changed.
Nothing was ever the same after that.
So far, the disease had cropped up in five different towns, ravaging everyone and everything in its wake. My father was one of them.
I begged my mother to leave the area, but her stubborn ass wouldn’t budge.
“I won’t hear of it! Nothing’s running me from my home,” she snapped.
I couldn’t believe people actually said that kind of thing outside of old movies. I figured it was one of those lines characters use when they’ve already decided they’re not going anywhere.
Then she gave me that look—sharp, deliberate—and sighed.
“Okay,” she said finally, downing her afternoon scotch. “When are we leaving?”
“I have patients, Mom,” I replied.
She smirked faintly, that judge’s confidence slipping through the exhaustion. “So do I, honey. Mine just happen to sit in courtrooms instead of hospital beds.”
“We just lost Albie to this shit. I won’t risk you as well,” she said.
That stopped me cold. Mom never swore. That was Dad’s thing. Hearing it from her snapped something loose inside me. I looked at her, really looked, and saw the fear beneath all that steel.
We stood there in silence, and in that silence we understood what needed to be done. If it was going to end, let it end like this—on our feet, fighting.
“Sue, honey, you die with your boots on,” my father had told me when he first started showing symptoms. He’d been delivering meds to the infected zones, refusing to stay home. I begged him to stop, but a daughter’s love isn’t enough to turn a man away from his calling.
I wish it were.
Back at the cabin, the world felt smaller, quieter. The disease had moved on, taking what it wanted and leaving the rest of us to sort through the ruins.
I sat in Dad’s old rocker, which creaked like it still remembered his rhythm. The fire popped softly in the hearth, smoke curling through the faint scent of pine and old varnish. A book lay on the end table—Judas, My Brother. Of course. Trust Dad to pick something that questioned everything. I turned it over, thumbed through the pages soft from use, and slipped on his glasses. The prescription was surprisingly close to mine. The world blurred for a heartbeat, then settled into focus—clearer, heavier.
Mom had built the fire and sat on the couch with her usual scotch, watching the flames without speaking. The glass glinted amber in her hand. She didn’t have to say anything. The silence between us said everything—loss, endurance, maybe even grace.
I read a few lines, hearing his voice in the space between words. Then I closed the book, leaned back in his chair, and let the rocker creak like it was breathing for him.
No one prepares you for the feeling of loving something that Death has touched.
But you learn.
You learn to read by its light.
Author’s Note:
Inspired by Fandango’s Story Starter #223.
Thank you, Fandango, for the spark — this one burned quietly but deep.
Memoirs of Madness 