I scrubbed bits of egg off a fork from my father’s uneaten breakfast before mother found out he failed to rinse the utensil before placing it in the sink.  The sky outside the kitchen window was flat and gray, like a piece of spoiled meat.  The air inside was oppressive and stifling, much like the rasp of my father’s breathing.  His slippers shuffled against the carpet, and I heard the clank of a spoon against ceramic.  Before I could volunteer to get the bowl, it hit the floor with a thud.  Then his cough came on suddenly; violent and wet as though a tornado ripped through his lungs.  I watched him from the entrance to the living room, my toes breaching the marble room divider he installed when I was in middle school.  Not long ago, he cruised around in his Corvette on Sunday afternoons.  When he wore a gray suit to work, he passed for a Mafia hitman rather than a manufacturing engineer.  Born of the Silent Generation, he carried himself with the stoicism of the era.  He knew how to build furniture and repair cars.  Hands that once moved with precision now gripped the edge of the couch, frail and trembling as he hacked himself into a shadow of his former self.  He would not let me help him, but he appreciated that I stood there in silence.  Silence was our currency.

Mother heard the clatter from the bathroom down the hall that she was wallpapering.  The shriek she produced before running down the hall would have made you think she hopped on top of the toilet seat from seeing a mouse.  Any inconvenience triggered her visceral emotional reactions often marked by an all-or-nothing intensity that seemed untethered to reality.  I walked over to him and shrouded his shoulders with a blanket, like a shield for what was about to come.  She gasped when she saw the chicken broth splattered across the beige carpet, her eyes narrowing in the kind of disgust reserved for something rotting.  Father sat motionless, staring at the mess as if awaiting a verdict.  My stomach churned.  It was just soup, a stupid bowl of soup, but the way she looked at him made me feel like I was watching someone stripped of their last shred of dignity.  I offered to help saying, No big deal. I will clean it up.  Mother scoffed as though my aid was like letting a toddler build a house.  She added, I am going to have to sell this place, you know.  A jolt went down my arms from the cruelty of her words, dismissing what was left of my father’s life.  I said nothing.  The only way to starve her toxicity was with silence.  Though she was not a stupid woman, she knew when silence meant protest.  She stomped out to the garage and came back in with a steam cleaner.  Mom, the noise, I pleaded knowing a dying man should not endure the power suction sound of a Bissel carpet machine.  The look she shot at me was not just horror, it was betrayal, asking whose side was I on.  I considered coming down on her for being cruel, but the only one who would suffer for an attack on her ego was the dying man sitting on the couch. 

Mother returned to the living room and in the ten minutes she took setting the contraption up, I could have sopped up the broth with a sponge eleven times.  But the silence, the cold, mechanical way she set up the machine, the precision with which she worked the nozzle over the carpet fibers—was the worst part.  I looked at my father, Would you like help down the hall?  He shook his head no.  I knew he would say no even if I asked him in the most nonchalant way possible.  Mother did not look up.  She was removing him from the house, starting with the carpet.

They were married for forty-one years, each year a forced notch in an old leather belt stretched out from the expanding girth of animosity and regret.  Their long marriage never a celebration of joy but a reminder of how long they endured each other.  Their arguments were always the same, a constant reel of resentment and grudges.  A woman destroyed by the PTSD from her alcoholic father and a man on his third marriage who did not want kids.  They were doomed from the start, but her birth control pregnancy changed everything.  He liked me when I behaved the way he wanted and cost as little money as possible.  The same rules applied to my mother.  He was no saint, but standing over a withered man eaten alive by cancer and demanding justice for my pain felt like a hollow and callous act.  Father’s smoking was the crux of their fighting.  It had been her refrain for years, You’ll kill yourself, you’ll kill me, you’ll kill us!  She screamed it when I was a child, her voice filling the house.  He would ignore her, taking a few drags while he mowed the lawn or changed the oil in the car, letting the cigarette burn halfway out as though taking those few drags didn’t count.

I watched him shuffle down the hallway.  Once he disappeared into his bedroom, I knelt beside her, reaching for the nozzle.  Let me finish this, I offered, but she jerked it away.  No, I’ve got it.  She had spent her life holding the threads of our family, tying them in knots, even when they frayed beyond recognition.  My father’s degrees hung in the study, testaments to his brilliance.  My mother’s work had no frame around it, no plaque, no award.  Some men respect a woman who takes care of a home and children, some do not.  My mother knew having a child and no education was not good math compared to the cost of living. 

Later that evening, the house settled into its usual, uneasy quiet. My father lay in his bed, his breaths shallow, each one a reminder that there was fewer left to count.  Mother retreated to the living room to watch Law and Order.  I noticed how lifeless the house seemed despite the hum of the refrigerator, the creek of floorboards, murmurs from a television.  It had shriveled, weary of the arguments, curt words, and loneliness embedded in the walls no matter how pretty the wallpaper used to cover them.  I remembered random phone calls from my father looking for sympathy after their fights never acknowledging the weight of patriarchal control, excusing himself because ‘that’s just how things were,’ followed by my mother’s refusal to see that choosing his money over her independence was still a choice, no matter how unjust the circumstances.  They tallied every grievance as though there was a grand prize at the end for whoever had the most.  Over the years, their carefully curated narratives made them victims of each other’s failings.  Their stories weren’t truths, they were shields, weapons, excuses.  I spent my life trying to unravel their mess, hoping somewhere in between those stories was sanity.

I walked down the hall to check on my father.  He was awake but barely, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.  I pulled a chair up beside him, the wooden legs scraping softly against the floor.  Can I get you anything before I head home? I asked.  He turned his head to meet my gaze.  His eyes were a puddle of water; their color muddled like an old bruise.  I hoped he would say something profound, something that would make sense of it all.  I prayed he would extend an olive branch and say it wasn’t all that bad, that I would be okay.   He was not the type to become tangled in emotional nets.  Expecting him to bare his soul now, lying on the shore of death, wasn’t fair.  No, he finally said, You can go home.  I nodded wanting to jump up and run out of there, but I stayed a minute or two more listening to his breathing.  I thought about taking his hand, about holding on to part of him before he disappeared forever.  His skin was pale and thin, stretched over his bones and shriveled like an empty balloon.  I hesitated, my hand lingering in my lap.  The silence between us was insurmountable, a chasm too wide for a single gesture to cross.  I sat there, giving the only thing I had to offer, my silent presence.

When I walked down the hall, mother was in the kitchen washing a plate.  She dragged the sponge in quick, rhythmic circles over the porcelain.  I inhaled the faint scent of Palmolive as stem emanated from the sink.  Her ferocity made me wince.  She looked up as I entered, her face carefully composed and said, I’m going to sell this place as soon as he’s gone.  I nodded.  I’ll get a condo, something smaller.  I’m tired of taking care of things and people.  I just want peace.  I nodded again.  She scrubbed harder.  I leaned against the doorway, watching her.  It’s just a house, you know, she said, her tone sharp, dismissive.  Four walls and a roof.  Nothing worth holding onto.  I wanted to tell her that houses were not just structures but repositories of everything we carried inside ourselves.  My composure buckled, Do you ever regret anything, I blurted out.  The words escaped before I could stop them, breaking through the careful guard I kept up for so long.  Her hands froze, the sponge hovering above the sink.  My chest tightened, jaw clenched, as I braced for the fallout from the furies now out of the box.  I wanted her to say yes, to admit that she knew everything was wrong, that we lived in aimless suffering for the sake of their egos.  But when she finally spoke, her voice was cool, detached.  What’s the point of regret?  It doesn’t change anything.  Her answer hit me hard.  It wasn’t just the dismissal; it was the finality of it.  No regret, no reflection, no acknowledgment of the wreckage we endured.  I wanted to scream at her, shake her, and make her feel something.  Instead, I nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat.  It was too late for her, for them.  All I could do was accept that what my parents taught me about life was how not to live. 

That night, back in my home, I sat by the window, staring out at the empty street. The evening’s stillness pressed against the glass as if the world had exhaled and forgotten to breathe again.  I kept thinking about my mother and father, not as parents, but as two people bound together by barbed wire.  They hadn’t built a life.  They endured one.

I filled the empty space in my chest with the effort of trying to hold them together, pouring myself into their brokenness as if mending them would make me whole.  But the more I gave, the space never filled as though it was a bottomless well.  They stayed together by building walls instead of bridges.  Sitting there I realized their wounds were their own.  Not mine to heal, not mine to bear.  I learned to bury my emotions, hiding them like a desperate squirrel preparing for a long winter.  I did this not out of saintly kindness.  I did it for survival.  Any chink in my armor gave their pain a chance to hit my heart.  I braced myself while their storms had raged, watching them capsize into the depth of resentment. 

When the last shovel of earth fell on my father’s casket, it was door forever sealed, followed by an echo fading to nothing, This is the end.  The words that remained unsaid fettered off into the vast universe.  I thought I might be angry or relieved, but instead, there was only silence.  Acceptance, I realized, was standing in the ruins of what was and letting go of the need to rebuild. 

– Danielle Crawford