I am outside walking and celebrating the falling snow. The noise of the nearby highway is dampened as much by the snow on the ground, as by the thick layer falling and filling the interstitial spaces of the sky. Each step is absorbed into this mixture of creamy snow and silence. It is all a welcome reprieve. Through the window, your bedside light and the dusk envelop you in a yellow glow and I imagine you in a protective hive.

The volume and power of your voice is nowhere near what it used to be when you stormed around breathing fire at a hundred and eighty pounds. Now your fat and most of your muscle mass is melting away, leaving you frail and thin at a hundred and forty pounds. My dragon father is disappearing piece by piece. Now, it’s not fire you breathe, only oxygen through the transparent cannula leading to your nose. I am certain that sometime during the night a kind and tame lamb has landed in your bed, climbed gently inside your body, and edged out the remnants of the angry tenant who resided there the previous eighty-six years.      

You delegate the watering and fertilizing of your large palm trees and peace lilies, the ones you have nourished for decades. Your plants are grieving your sudden disappearance and longing for your chatter-laced watering to return. When you enter the kitchen, I have seen your palm trees strain to catch a glimpse of you. Their missing you will soon be my heartache to bear, long before I am anywhere near ready.

The act of browsing through the local library stacks, observing others, and inhaling the books’ aroma, is a sacred ritual in your life. This year, as the leaves melted from green to bright red and yellow, your resistance to getting an e-reader was immutable. By this winter, your last, you can no longer muster the strength to get to the library. Today we purchase the latest police procedural together on your new device. Three minutes of tapping and sliding and a book is sitting on your tablet ready to feast on. Even you, the man who I rarely amaze, is jubilant.

In taking care of you, lots of memories are summoned up. I am four years old, a buoyant, bouncing electron with too much energy. I corral you around the legs begging you to fly away with me and my elephant. Looking down at me you say sternly,   “You must learn to amuse yourself. I’m not here to entertain you.” I learn the value of independence early on.  You are preoccupied and when you deign to focus your attention on me, you are often that fiery dragon. When I am 9 years old you interrogate me harshly.                                                                    

“Do you think your cat Mango actually knows his name? He is only kind to you because you feed him. If you go to the back door and call Dopey at dinnertime, Mango will come running.”  

Burned and shaken, I wait until the sun melts into evening, venture to the sliding glass door, and call Dopey out into the yard, sure my cat won’t come. My beloved Mango bolts out of the bushes ready for his dinner. I struggle with this outcome for days and but ultimately, I know that Mango and I are deeply connected and that was what mattered. What is confusing is why you’re so mean about it. I trust Mango more than you.

We bond over sports, and you teach me how to ride a bicycle, play tennis, and properly catch and throw both a baseball and a football. Huge kudos to you for recognizing my interest and not letting the society of the 1950’s dictate to you that girls shouldn’t do these things.  Sports is the only time where we play on the same team. In our pretend football game, it is always a Sunday afternoon with dusk closing in on a comeback fourth quarter for our home team. You, as Joe Namath, fade back to pass, line up and throw a perfect spiral and find me, as Matt Snell, on a 10-yard up and out, securing an essential first down. With the clock running and less than two minutes to go, we gather at the line of scrimmage to start our final play. I go up the mid-right side, sprint 10 yards, fake right, and then cut to my left, opening my arms into your spinning pass. We rejoice together and continue this sweet and connected choreography with a buttonhook or a post corner. Too soon, we can no longer see the ball and the evening sky is dripping with dew and dense navy-blue shadows. On the way home, I lean my hot forehead on the chilled car window and watch the line of thick trees flick by as we drive in silence. I am well trained to know you want and need quiet and I am ever grateful to have this time with you.

At age 13, in 1968, I wake up to the horror of the Vietnam war, the violent toll of racism, and the plight of American farm workers. I connect with the social justice community and begin my own evolution into a committed activist. Our debates become more interesting and informed, but too contentious. Instead of issuing a constructive challenge, you are an angry, often yelling  contrarian to every point I make, many of which you privately agree with. No matter how well prepared I am, you often say to me,                                                                                        

“That’s just wrong’’ or “You’re too stupid to understand this.”                                                  

You are an engineer with excellent spatial awareness and talent in math and science. I don’t have those qualities, but I have potential and desire. Yet, early on, you reserve your most severe criticism for this desire of mine – to better understand your world. You often say,                  

“You will never understand math or science; you are missing that part of your brain.”          

Sadly, I believe you. Your strident tone and confident words temporarily solder my fate. I lose confidence in my own abilities to negotiate academics, and math and science in particular. This leads to a circuitous and slow route to medicine, but I eventually become a physician; a clinician-educator, and an AIDS specialist.

On a spring visit, I arrive home to find your office, which doubles as the guest room, with a book by Peter Duesberg, a notorious AIDS denialist. The next morning, across the breakfast table, you initiate a conversation.

“Do you know you are poisoning your patients with the AIDS meds you tout? You are responsible for killing your patients,” roared the dragon.

“Dad, do you really believe this?”

I reel from your attack. By this juncture, I know arguing with you is futile, but I do anyhow. I need to defend a truth that is both part of my expertise, and my heart. Your fusillade of ignorance continues for another decade.

On a Friday night, while we are out to dinner, six years before you die, in between bites of breadsticks smeared with butter and apropos of nothing, you tell me that your mother never wanted you. That your neighbor, Mrs. Silver, was the mother figure in your life and had been the one to take care of you. Then you ask me to pass the salt. You have broken your habit of  acting invincible and arrogant and lead with being unguarded and exposed. Your portrait enlarges for me as a tension between us settles.

Six months before you die, and twenty-one years into my AIDS work, you pull a wrinkled dollar bill out of your pocket and hand it to me. Your voice is weak, you are recovering from pneumonia and your inexorable weight loss has continued. This is also the week you start round-the-clock oxygen for your breathing.

“What’s this dollar for Dad? Did I win one of our dollar bets on something?” I ask.

“I was wrong about the AIDS meds,” you say in a thin and almost inaudible voice. All your banter and posturing has never been about AIDS, it’s probably about some very insecure place you internally lived in. I also know that you are indelibly proud of my accomplishments. Holding both truths feels right.

Tonight, as my snow celebration walk comes to an end, I pass your window again and notice your yellow hive has gone dark. An hour later, I enter your room to wake you from a nap. I find your e-reader still perched on your chest awaiting your return while the noisy oxygen concentrator rhythmically howls. I report the house news of the day; the plant update, how the invasive ants are faring with our new sugar and boric acid mixture (this time we are winning), and which bills I paid.

Despite your physical diminishment, your frequent sleep, incessant cough, and the din of the oxygen machine, more of you is present for me than ever before. Each meal is an important choice to you and when I bring your old favorites, (egg noodles with ketchup and butter, pastrami with Dr. Brown’s cream soda, or buckwheat pancakes), I can see you smile, aware of the tenderness and love with which I hold you. This is something I’ve rarely recognized when you were in your dragon mode. In your lamb configuration, you are vulnerable and are allowing me further into your heart. I feel gratitude and astonishment to have this deep connection with you at the end of your life. Having tried so many pathways and routes to your heart, this one just dropped down naturally, an orange-red maple leaf, meandering to the ground in October.