One of my earliest fears
was losing my father.
I was a child
who knew there was a war somewhere
and understood only this –
that fathers could be taken away.
Years later,
on his eightieth birthday,
I looked at him
thin and fragile
and still I told myself
there would be time.
Time to go to Mass with him again,
to drive him there,
to sit beside him in the familiar quiet.
Then came the hospital.
And still I thought
there would be time.
Time for him to recover.
Time for him to come home.
Time for ordinary days
to become ordinary again.
Even after the words
terminal cancer,
some part of me
kept bargaining.
Not yet.
Surely not yet.
And so there were days
I did not visit,
because I believed
we still had days to spare.
Then came
the final room.
His hand beneath mine.
His eyes half-open.
The strange helplessness
of loving someone
and not knowing what they need.
All those years
I had spent around dying people,
and still
when it was my father in the bed,
I became a child again.
Perhaps love
makes us beginners.
Perhaps it leaves us
hoping
right until the end
that someone will tell us
there is still
more time.
Later,
the phone rang.
And suddenly
there wasn’t.
Even now, I return
to those last days –
wishing I had known,
stayed longer,
noticed more.
But memory brings me
his hand beneath mine,
and the moments
when he quietened
because I was there.
I thought
there would be more time.
There wasn’t.
But there was
that hand,
that quiet,
that last small way
of being his daughter.