Fleas... again

My father died last autumn.

He had fallen from the 2nd floor balcony at our cottage. It overlooks the large kitchen/dining area and leads to the two upstairs bedrooms. When he built the place in the sixties, he never finished the overhead walkway, which means that there was no railing at the far end. As a child, I often wondered why, and stood over the three-foot gap, thinking of jumping down, simultaneously terrified and curious.

My father's cognitive skills were starting to fail. He got up in the middle of the night to take a leak. He hadn't realised that he was at the cottage, not at his house, where the bathroom is to the immediate right of his bedroom.

I wasn't there that night. My brothers told me that they heard a crash and found my dad straining, but otherwise all right. Everyone laughed, including the initiator of the raucus (though his eleven broken ribs made it kinda painful).

He went to the hospital and was required to stay in bed to let everything heal (he had three broken verterbrae in addition to the ribs). Unfortunately, things started going "bad". He caught two dangerous infections and, though he fought them off, he got worse.

We never thought he would die from a simple fall and a few broken ribs (having played football, we all knew the intense pain of the injury, but also that it goes away pretty quickly). One evening, I received a call from my mother. The brothers had gotten together. I should come meet them.

The doctors had told them that my dad's kidneys were failing and that the pain from his injuries was just not going away. My father spent two months suffering, and his time was nigh. We ate, and, holding his fate in our hands, decided that my father was going to die the following day.

...we then drank. Nobody cried. We sometimes laughed. We used drink to overcome our numbness.

I couldn't stay in the room to watch my father die. The two brothers with girlfriends stayed. The two without sat on the floor of a busy hospital hallway in a daze.

Since that day, my mortality has been shrouding me. I, one day, will no longer exist.

==============

Gargy faced his imminent slaughter grimly. I cannot read Romanian, so he explained what had to be done to get rid of Annie's fleas. He was going to sacrifice his existence - a gift from the universe so fragile and so ephemereal - in order to improve the lives of those closest to him.

I got out my battery-operated circular saw and we headed down to the park (we wanted to get his flea-manna blood away from the house). When we got to a secluded place in one far corner, my little gargoyle's big, beautiful brown eyes looked into mine, tears welling, as he scratched his hanging maleness like crazy. He knelt and looked down, presenting the back of his neck to my blade.

As I started the shrieky whirring of my instrument, a raccoon, quite obviously psychotic, demented and slightly unbalanced, frantically ran from over by the football field screaming for me to stop.

He was a faithful reader of these stories. He had Googled the site Gargy referenced and explained that it was a satire. Romanians have this thing for blood sucking and letting, so the article we read was simply that famous Bucharest dark humour. He also recommended a really great flea powder that'll get rid of our bug problem in a couple days.

Well, what a fortunate way out of THAT impasse!