I am Made of This

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming piece I am Made of This to be read on February 2, 2015 at the Merlin in Stuttgart (more information to come).

Cancer Keys
I found a collection of keys in my father’s closet. They hung on tiny hooks in a metal box. I opened the door to the box and touched the spare car keys, bike-lock keys, a single skeleton key. One that looked like it would open a basement door. Another could have been the key to a safe. House keys, a mailbox key, file cabinet key and one for the garage door. There were copies of keys. Shiny, cold metal keys.
My father was dying of cancer. We had placed the hospital bed in the living room of my father’s bachelor apartment where he could supervise the kitchen and the small patch of trees behind the building. My brother sold the sofa that once stood where our father lay now, puking and losing all fluids imaginable. The dining table was changed into the nurse’s station with boxes of plastic gloves, green gowns, disinfectant, needles, bandages, urine bags, poop bags, tubes and tape. There was a log where the nurses and the doctors wrote down what medications my father should take for pain, a bleeding nose, the vomiting. Underneath the table were I.V. bags full of milky and clear liquids – my father’s nutrition since January. None of the foods he consumed the normal way fed him. The tumors were all over his stomach.
Sometimes when the nurses had come and gone, leaving a mess on the table and the smell of hospital in the air, I could see pieces of the Christmas tablecloth that was still underneath all the medical equipment. On Christmas Eve, a month ago, we didn’t know that my father would have to sell his couch to make room for a hospital bed. Then I had helped my father set the table and decorate the tree, while he ran to the bathroom to throw up. We didn’t know his bowels had already been obstructed for weeks. I remember the fight we had because I wanted to take him to the hospital on Christmas. He was furious and insisted on cooking for us. I understand now why. My father must have known it would be our last feast.
On that day in January when I found the key box, I dragged the urine-soaked sheets to the washing machine in the closet, and I just stayed there. I held back tears, exhaustion, fear and disgust. I tried to make my mind bland, empty, and I prayed for one of my family members to come and relieve me. Then my father called from the living room. He was thirsty. He wanted Fanta, the sweet yellow liquid that we only drank during special occasions when we were kids.
“Yes, I’ll get you Fanta,” I called back. “Soon.”
But I never did.
When my father looked at me, his eyes were foggy. He couldn’t focus for long and before he noticed that I didn’t bring him Fanta, he was unconscious again. I didn’t because the doctor had told us that anything carbonated would trigger him to throw up. But that is only half of the truth. I was afraid to come near him. I was scared of this pale, sick, shrinking man who was my father.
I remained in the closet that smelled of piss, cleaning supplies and metal. I took the box of keys and packed it into a cardboard moving box, listening as the keys cheered and clinked against each other. So many keys that opened and locked places and things, but not one key that would unlock a strength, a space that would give me the courage to take care of my dying father.