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Excerpt
Hospice for the Holidays
My mom called at four thirty on the
afternoon of December twenty first. “Your dad’s home from the hospital;
he’s on hospice.”
Dad had been diagnosed with esophageal
cancer months earlier, and now he had been sent home to die.
That night, I caught the red-eye flight from
Los Angeles to Cleveland, arriving three days before Christmas. Though I
tried to make it home once a year, I had not shared a Christmas with my
family in more than a decade. The thought of crowded airports, cramped
coach cabins, and the bitter cold that was Ohio in December had trumped
the desire to spend the holidays east of the Mississippi. Now, arriving
at my girlhood home at seven in the morning, I shivered in the sub-zero
temperature. The pine trees lining the drive way were draped in heavy
snow, and my boots crunched on the rock salt covering the sidewalk.
Warmth and a wave of nostalgia greeted me
when I stepped through the front door. My mom was in the midst of
picking up a screaming teapot. The sink was half filled with dishes and
an unread newspaper lay on the kitchen table. Both of my sisters sat at
the kitchen table sipping heavily creamed coffee. The status quo was
interrupted by my arrival into the kitchen. We group-hugged, laughed and
avoided the obvious.
After I answered the usual polite questions
about my flight, airline food and the enviable California weather, the
conversion lagged.
Finally, my mom whispered, “Your dad’s
downstairs.” This was mom’s way of saying “go downstairs and see your
dad.”
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