[HR] The Week That Was(n’t)
The doctor promised that he wouldn’t open his eyes. Not after they took out the breathing tube.
But he did. And I sat there with my dad’s hand in mine, the rhythmic beep of the heart rate monitor counting out our final moments together, the details crisp and unforgettable.
His green eyes, littered with subtle yellow streaks, still alive and aware while the rest of his body failed him.
The tear that slid down his cheek as he opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t.
The harsh ridges of the calluses from years of playing golf scratching lightly against my skin as he squeezed my hand, the pressure soft, yet so hard I wanted to scream.
I leaned in close enough to feel the scratch of his week-old beard rub against my cheek. “I love you, dad,” I whispered.
He smiled. Just a twitch of the lips. But I saw it.
And somehow, that was enough. Enough to quiet the doubt. Enough to silence the guilt of letting him go.
Then his eyes closed forever and he was gone.
***
That evening, I lay in my childhood bed, the house devoid of both my mom and dad for the first time I could recall. I closed my eyes and tried to summon the memory – something to hold onto. Something to quiet the ache.
But it wasn’t there. Not the real memory. All that came to me was a single image of my dad, his eyes open, looking into mine. Just a fragment of the memory, like an animation cel framed and hung on the wall. I wanted more. The feeling of his hand in mine. The look in his eyes as he smiled that last time. Something – anything – to absolve me of the decision I made.
But all I got was the single snapshot image.
And without the memory to reassure me, I began to wonder – had it happened at all?
***
After several days of digging through my parents’ house, finding mostly junk but occasionally stumbling on a forgotten relic that kept the pain from receding, I was thankful to be in my car, headed home, even if it was a four-hour drive.
The challenge was how to pass the time without thinking about my dad. I needed a break. The image of his final moment still hung silently in my mind, and I remained unable to coax it into motion. And without that, without the full memory to contextualize the moment, it was growing like cancer in my soul. I needed to purge it out of existence
My solution: a non-fiction audiobook. It was the last thing my dad would have wanted to listen to – he favored legal thrillers and conspiracy theories.
Searching through my Audible account, I found Oddities of the Universe, a book I’d started listening to months ago, but had never finished. I remembered it as an unusual mix of Cosmos and the Twilight Zone, mixing hard and theoretical science and physics to tell tales of what the universe might be – with an emphasis on might. I’d found it interesting but difficult to comprehend at times, requiring a level of focus I rarely wanted to give. Which made it perfect for what I needed then.
I started the audio book, and found I was in the middle of a chapter called, The Boltzmann Brain. That didn’t ring a bell, and then I remembered the last time I’d listened to the book, when I was preparing for a marathon several months back. It had been a difficult training day, my calves cramping early in the run, and I had given up on the audiobook midway through the chapter because I couldn’t focus on a word it was saying. I decided to rewind back to the beginning of the chapter.
“As we’ve discussed so far, the universe is a mysterious place," the narrator said as I rolled to a stop at a red light in the middle of some town in nowhere Texas. I’d decided to take the back roads home to avoid the highways. The tradeoff? Endless small towns and randomly placed stoplights. Slow going, but worth it.
The light turned green and I pressed the accelerator as the narrator continued with, “but few offer mysteries as unusual as the Boltzmann Brain.” A car suddenly cut in front of me and I leaned into my horn, yelling a series of expletives, and missing the next few words.
“… may very well be a reality – or the reality, in fact,” the narrator said, adding emphasis to the last several word. “Imagine a brain which just spontaneously formed from particles in the void. Your brain. With each memory, a whole life’s worth, nothing more than pre-loaded snapshots of events that never actually existed. And this brain, it exists for just an instant and then …”
I jerked in my seat and hit pause.
Snapshots.
The image of my dad, what I was so desperately trying to purge, came rushing back.
It was a snapshot. No motion. No texture.
Is it? Am I?
I shook my head at the thought. Ridiculous. It was real. It had to be. I was there. I’d just left.
I reached for my phone and scrolled through my Audible app to find a different book. I didn’t need to add existential dread to the list of emotional stress I was under. I quickly found something much better, one that offered no chance to dovetail with reality – a LitRPG audiobook about some guy fighting dragons with a talking squirrel as his assistant.
I pressed play. The narrator – voicing all the characters, including the squirrel – successfully suppressed my moment of existential panic.
But it was not forgotten.
***
"You ought to lower the shades," Emmy said as she walked onto our back porch, a glass of wine in hand. I picked up the remote and pressed the button to lower them. They were down, creating the much-needed cover, by the time Emmy sat beside me.
“Are you ready for the funeral?” she asked, leaning back into her chair.
It had been almost a week since my dad died, and the funeral was the next day. Ready was a relative term – I didn’t think I’d ever truly be ready to bury my dad – but I was as ready as I could be, so I nodded and gave a half-hearted smile.
I picked up my glass and took a sip, savoring the ice-chilled notes of smoke and caramel in the bourbon. It was a special glass with an Indian head penny glued to one side. Emmy bought it on a trip with her mom and gave it to me for Father’s Day. When was that? Two years ago - that seemed right. Christoff was still little then.
I looked closely at the penny. It was a familiar friend, my thumb having rubbed it thousands of times while I took a drink. And I remembered having shared the story of its meaning countless times with friends and neighbors. But I suddenly couldn't remember the tale itself. I could see a snapshot – that word again – of the moment when Emmy had given me the glass, and I could remember telling others about the glass. But the context, the story and the memory itself, were gone.
Something inside me twitched when I recognized the pattern that was emerging. I sat the glass down on the table beside me, letting it drop a little too soon.
The sound of the glass landing on the table startled Emmy, who looked up from her wine, confusion and concern in her blue eyes. "Are you okay?"
I lifted my hand and ran it through my hair. "Does it seem to you like I'm forgetting stuff lately?"
She thought for a moment and then shook her head. "No more than usual."
"What does that mean?"
She laughed. "You've always been forgetful. It's one of your more endearing traits." She paused and then added, "Most of the time."
She was right. It always seemed like I couldn't remember the simplest things – like where I left my keys, where the TV remote was – things like that.
But this was different. Or at least it seemed like it was.
"Have you heard of a Boltzmann Brain?" I asked.
"A Bolt-what?" she replied, taking a drink of her rosé. "What are you talking about?"
"Well, it's this theory that maybe everything is—”
Out of nowhere, Christoff came running onto the patio and jumped on my lap, cutting me off before I could finish. "Dad! Dad! I found a lizard!" He spun, arm raised and finger pointing to show me where, and in the process caught my bourbon glass with his foot, sending it flying off the small side table. It shattered when it hit the ground.
"Christoff!" I yelled as I looked down at my favorite glass, the penny now staring at me as one of dozens of shattered pieces.
Christoff climbed off my lap and ran back out into the yard. "Sorry dad," he said, oblivious to what he’d just done.
I reached over and picked up the piece of the glass with the penny on it, instinctively recalling the moment it fell, just seconds ago. The image popped into my head of the glass hitting the ground.
It was a snapshot of that moment.
And nothing else.
***
I felt Emmy's Kindle fall against my shoulder and knew she was asleep. It was her nightly routine – start reading and within minutes be out cold, her Kindle slipping from her grasp. It was my job to move it, so I did, setting it on the nightstand on my side of the bed.
Rolling back over, I propped my Kindle up on my chest and began to read again, skimming the page mechanically and clicking to the next.
But I couldn’t focus, my eyes seeing the words, thinking of something else – images, snapshots, of every memory that I could conjure. They were flashing through my mind like the slides my grandparents used to show.
My dad and I playing catch. Click.
Emmy holding Christoff for the first time. Click.
Christoff crawling across the room to me. Click.
My dad and Christoff on the couch playing Minecraft. Click.
My dad's eyes, looking at me as he died. Click.
I tried to stop each one, to turn the snapshot into a real memory, a video instead of a picture. I wanted – I needed – to see them alive. To prove that—
No. They had to be real. I was living new moments. Every second. I could feel time passing – breaths, heartbeats, the weight of the Kindle rising and falling on my chest. I could feel each one becoming … a memory (?) in my mind. That had to mean something – each was real and true. Right?
I held onto that thought, waiting for it to solidify into the truth.
It didn’t.
I turned to Emmy. She was snoring softly as she did most nights. I thought of Christoff, sleeping soundly in his room down the hall, no doubt subconsciously preparing to come and wake us way too early. I conjured the snapshot of my dad, that last moment with him, his eyes looking into mine.
Who was he? Who were they, Emmy and Christoff? Who was I?
Christoff coughed, the sound echoing from down the hall, snapping me back to reality.
Pulling the covers back, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and walked down the hall to check on him, using the moonlight shining through the window in Christoff’s room as my guide.
When I got there, I found his blanket on the floor – he had squirmed it off, no doubt during a dream about race cars or being chased by dinosaurs. I picked it up and laid it back over him.
“You okay?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer. Just silence.
I leaned over and stuck my ear next to his mouth, like I did when he was a baby. To see if he was breathing. To make sure he was alive.
His warm breath hit my ear with a constant rhythm and I stayed there, counting each time he exhaled.
One.
Two.
Three.
I whispered, “I love you.”
He smiled. Just a twitch of the lips. The image froze in my mind, taking its place next to all the others.
I turned to walk back to my bed where my wife was still snoring softly. I gave one last glance to Christoff, thankful. For him. Emmy. My dad.
Everything.
I looked back one last time at Christoff, thankful he was—
And then it all froze. The world ceased its movement around me.
And what was, wasn’t.