The Old Man Passes

 Like many people, I have two grandmothers. One passed away over a three year period, slowly wasting away until her last year or so she was reduced to a living corpse. My other grandmother is still very vibrant at 87 years old and I know that one of her worst fears is to not die quickly. 

This is a scene I edited out of my unpublished novel Freedom Weed, but I like it enough to put here.

  In the next room over the old man hacked a long, wet, gurgling cough. Jay looked away from daytime TV lawyer ad and paused to listen. It stopped and the raspy sound of his father’s struggled breaths continued. On the burgundy coffee table in front of him, Jay pushed the empty candy dish and the yellowing doily under it over to the side to make more room for his Beretta. It was a thing of beauty, even when taken apart, the black barrel shone against the Court TV blaring away in front of the living room. It was an old, old TV, encased in wood and 200 pounds of tubes,  knobs and vacuumed gases all to give a lucky viewer a nice 22 inch color screen.
           Jay didn’t really look up as the skinny trailer trash – all dolled up for the television – tried to talk the stocky black judge into letting her keep a wedding ring her ex-fiancé wanted back. Jay didn’t care music for TV – hadn’t even lived with one until he decided to move in with his dad and help him die.
           Mom sure knew how to go, Jay told himself, carefully staggering the bullets into his backup magazine. Three days of saying good bye, then…plop. His dad had been a mess those three days and was of no use – and now he just kept living for some god damned reason that Jay couldn’t figure out. But he couldn’t complain – he took a break from business to take a caregiver class and now twice a month he cut a halfway decent check from good old Washington state for doing nothing other than watching his old man slowly fade. After working for eleven yes in every shit labor job he could find, Jay had saved enough for some nice chainsaws and a truck with trailer. Figuring that if he was going to risk his life every day for some change it may as well on his own terms. Caregiving was another shit-pay job, but it beat cutting down trees for soft-bodied rich people or digging ditches for next to nothing to make some prick rich. Besides he didn’t need much, cleaning out his dead mother’s pistol for the tenth or eleventh time this year gave him plenty of satisfaction.

He thought it’d be nice to burn some money target shooting out in the woods, and besides he felt a hell of a lot more comfortable taking something with him a little more handy than his granddad’s clunky rifle in case he ran up against something he didn’t expect. Good old mama Dennesy had taught him that lesson when he was pre-pubescent on a trip to pick huckleberries in late August where it was so damn hot and dry and itchy the only thing that kept young Jay going was to sneak a few into his mouth every time his hard-ass mom turned her head. When a black bear poked a head into berry patch, Jay’s dropped the berries in his hand, his heart a bass drum in his chest, shaking his T-shirt with every beat. In one smooth, steely-eyed move, his mom reached down by her calf and pulled out the pistol. She shot it once into the bushes near the bear and the timid monster couldn’t run away fast enough. “How bout you quit eatin em so we can hurry this up,” Jays mom said to him without so much as turning her head in his direction. Always best to be prepared.

Like a horrible cuckoo clock, the old man let out another long cough on the half hour.   The TV judge made his verdict and Jay knew it was time to feed his dad the medical goo which barely kept him alive. He put his hand on his fathers greying shirt and shook him.

“Dad. Dad,” Jay raised his voice, “DAD. What do you want chocolate or vanilla.”

“Aaaauuuuggghh,” his father lifted his hand and waved it at cup filled with a sticky vanilla-flavored sludge. He smacked his purple lips and struggled through the flem in his throught. “Jaaay,” he said - a crackling, bubbling whisper.

“Dad? What? Do you want the chocolate?” Jay looked down at his dad’s grey veiny hand grasping his forearm.

“No, Jay.” Each word was barely audible after a deep deep wheezy breath. Jay leaned in to hear. “Jay. Jay.”
    “What dad? What do you need.” for the past three days the old man hadn’t said a word. Jay thought for sure he’d have to call in hospice any minute. “Dad? tell me what you need?”

“Huuu Huuuu,” he struggled, his eyes bulging and shaking in their sockets as he tried to bring his body closer to Jay to utter his last words, “Hoookers.” The old man fell back on to the bed and went limp, the pulse inside his sickly grey skin coming to a slow halt.