Last Father’s Day

You craved mussels when you were dying. The dexamethasone
made you ravenous in your first last weeks. We wanted
to bring you home for Father’s Day, treat you to a rare feast
in a landlocked province. We desperately needed
the pelting rain to quell the raging wildfires,
but the timing was just awful.

My brother called to cancel as my daughter pressed
her nose to the display case at the seafood market, clutching
a pouch in which bobbed a solitary pickle. He said
you’d get soaked between hospital, car and house,
catch your death of a cold. We can try again next weekend.
I looked outside, asphalt glossy as the onyx shells
beneath cool LED. Fine. The highways will be slick, anyway.

Another reason I wanted you in the city, but you scored too high
on cognition to qualify for hospice; you could draw a clock face
with the correct time, parrot a string of words back to the palliative care nurse
—ball, pen, Monday, bicycle, horse—but you always thought it was 1982.
You were dying, but not dying enough, according to a system
sickly as your cancer-spattered body.

I bought four pounds of mussels anyway. They’d live
as long as they were kept cold and allowed to breathe.
It was like playing tug-of-war while treading water, dividing
my time between your rural hospital room and home
with my own family, burning fossil fuels two hours each way
while emergency alerts blared simultaneously from my phone
and radio, because every moment is precious and these days don’t last forever.

I spent the next Sunday fossicking through shells, discarding
those that would not close under the flush of tap-cold
water, dead mouths gaping like the holes in your sweater
—a threadbare rag that barely covered your bones.
I bought you new clothes, even though they were destined
for the Goodwill pile. I steamed the mussels in a tomato broth,
tossed them with linguine in a cheap plastic container,
reheated it in the hospital microwave. I didn’t care
about the smell or phthalates released.

By then you were on a soft foods diet. I split mantle
from nacre, quartered the ochre meat and mashed it
with a dollar store fork, placed it on your pallid tongue.
You rolled it around your mouth, savouring the brackish taste.
I was disappointed you didn’t want more, but I understood.
I was a small girl in your lap again, verklempt, begging you
not to go. You had always been my lodestar,
the rope that tethered me to home.

I wasn’t with you when you died. I needed
to be with my own daughter, hold her and braid
my frayed ends together so I wouldn’t drift
when our line was severed. I knew
you’d understand, but I’m still sorry.