Chapter 16
Dad got sick the year I turned twenty-six.
Not terribly at first.
Fatigue.
Weight loss.
A cough that lingered.
Then tests.
Then the word cancer.
My whole body rejected it.
I had spent years rebuilding him in my mind.
I was not ready for mortality to touch him.
At the hospital, he tried to apologize for needing help.
I gave him the look.
He smiled weakly.
“Right. We don’t do that anymore.”
“No.”
Ethan handled legal paperwork.
I handled doctors.
Dad handled making terrible jokes.
Treatment was hard.
Some days he looked like the man who failed me.
Some days he looked like the man who stayed.
Both were true.
One evening, he asked me to wheel him through the hospital garden.
The reversal was not lost on either of us.
He sat in the chair, thin hands folded.
“I understand something now,” he said.
“What?”
“How vulnerable you were. How much trust it takes to be pushed by someone else.”
I stopped walking.
He looked back at me.
“I am sorry I gave Karen that power over you.”
The apology was old.
But this time, it reached a new place.
“I forgive you for being fooled,” I said.
His eyes filled.
“I don’t forgive you for staying fooled after signs appeared. But I forgive the father who came back.”
He cried.
May you like
So did I.
Forgiveness, I learned, could be partial and still real.
