A MEMORY
The air smells artificial and heavily processed. The sheets and curtains surrounding me are coated with an empty and bare white, with nothing behind it. The strange cleanliness and gloom environment frightens me. But what makes it scarier is the steady, beeping sound of the machines keeping my father alive.
I am sitting at the white bench beside my father's hospital bed. My father has cold sweat on his forehead, and he has this lifeless look in his eyes that makes me feel that he is dead already. Except that he isn't. The tubes in his chest and the machines pumping blood and nutrition to his heart are the only things that are helping him stay alive. Its pretty ironic, if you ask me, that his whole life depends on an off or on switch. That something as strong as a human life could flicker away once someone else clicks something as small as a button, with a power sign carved into it. It just pains me to see my father holding on to his life, which is powered and fueled by a machine that doesn't even have a life.
When my father finally turns his head, he rasps one single word.
"Water," he says, his voice barely a whisper.
That act alone sends the high-pitched beeping of the respirator off course and off its steady rhythm. I hold the plain white cup to his lips as he painfully, but thirstily, gulps it down, wincing every time he swallows.
After he finally sips the last drop of water inside the cup, he moves his head back to the way it was, staring at that white, vacant, ceiling. His pale and bald head makes me shudder, to see him fighting an inevitable fate. He used to be energetic and strong, taking long walks every day even at the age of seventy. Then suddenly the common cold turned his already weak immune system upside down, and his health came crashing down like dominoes, until four agonizing weeks later he ended up in this transparent and emotionless facility to die.
The doctor suddenly comes in and motions with his fingers for me to step outside.
"Its, useless, Mr. Wasler. Your father will only last until eight o'clock in the morning at most."
"Well, Doctor, I would like to have some last moments with my father first." I quickly reply, with my head down, accepting my father's fate.
I hear my phone's shrill whistle, alarming me to start driving to my friend Buster's bachelor party. I would've turned it off, if it weren't for the sudden immediate call from the hospital that my father had just suffered a fatal stroke. For those two weeks that he had been hospitalized, I only visited him twice. Now I wish I had gone every day, to comfort him, and to make him feel less lonely. For all these years since I left my single father at the age of twenty, I only visited him during Thanksgiving, summer, and Christmas. How lonely it must have been for him to rest in his comfy log cabin every day, with no soul mate with him. My mother had died giving birth to me, and he had been alone in that little home of his own, isolated from the outside world. Now I feel ashamed to not be there for him, even when I knew he was already slowly drifting away from life. I immediately turn off the high-pitched alarm and turn off my phone too, so I won't read Buster's messages urging me to go.
"Dad?" I ask.
"Yes, son?"
"Dad, would you like to stay?"
"Son, whatever choice you make, I am fine with it. I will endure pain, because your happiness makes my heart warm."
Tears fill my eyes and slowly drop down my cheeks at the words of my father. Then and there I decide that father is more important than anything in the world, never mind a bachelor party.
The steady pulses of sound swerve off rhythm, and my father suddenly goes into shock again. Before I know it, doctors and nurses surround my father and try to refrain his spastic involuntary movements of kicking and shaking. When the ordeal finally ends, I realize that only thirty seconds have passed, but those thirty seconds passed in slow motion, with each agonizing millisecond making me throb with despair.
"Mr. Wasler, I predict three hours before his organs fail. By that time, even the machines will not keep him alive. Please make your choice now. The paper is here." Even the doctor knows that my father is in pain, and he I know he is urging me to sign that paper, or else he wouldn't have shown it to me.
The instant after the doctor leaves, panic settles in and my mind whirs to the possibilities. To say that he wants to be alive to the last second was gibberish. Even the doctor wants me to stop his suffering! Only my selfish self wants to keep him like that. As I sit on that bench, making the hardest decision of my life, memories of my father flood my thought like rain in a downpour.
The first blob of water hits me, pounding my mind with a joyous childhood. I see my father sitting next to me, fishing with me on the shore of our county river. I see my father's warm smile, as I slammed my foot down on the home plate during my little league days. I hear his voice as he cheered for the Lakers as we watched Kobe Bryant dunk on our old box television. I see my child self, crying because I was scratched, and my father rushing to calm me. I see my father lending me his car, so I could drive my date to the prom. When I finally see my father's tears of joy as I threw my four-pointed cap in the air with my peers, a waterfall of joy surges my mind, and at this instant I know what to do.
I realize the love he has given me, and through all those years, what he has sacrificed and given to make me the person that I am now. Now I realize that I have been selfish, and cruel in my eyes, to keep my father like this. I have realized that the love I have given him isn't truly love at all. My father needs to get what he deserves.
'Mr. Wasler?" The doctor has seen me approach the folder that lies across the bench.
"Doctor, I have made my decision."
"And?"
"I will do it myself."
With all the courage I can conjure, I kiss my father one last time, use the thumb that was partially created by my father to click the button, and head for Buster's party.
At the corner of his mouth, I can see my father's lips move just a little bit, using all his remaining energy to say what comes next.
"Good luck, son."