because the whole week was exhausting. None of us slept. Our eyes swollen from crying. My throat was so sore I worried it was strep. When the strep test came back negative, I worried it was COVID. Because the hospital bed still sat in the corner with medical supplies stacked beside it. The neighbors kept bringing over food and so we grief-ate. That morning I woke at 3:45am to give my dad his dose of morphine. I found my mom asleep in the recliner and when I woke her, she said, I couldn’t hear him breathing from the bedroom. I sent her to bed, tucked the syringe into my dad’s cheek and pushed the plunger slowly, the morphine absorbing because he could no longer swallow. I stayed up till 5am, dozed till 6:30am when my mom woke and took over so I could go for a run. Because it’s hard to cry while running. And when my dad’s brothers and sister arrived I greeted them in the driveway, the day cruelly bright and beautiful. It took his brothers three tries to make it into the house, three tries to say goodbye. My aunt called my sister by the wrong name but none of us corrected her. And then my dad’s best friend showed up. It took him thirty minutes and four cigarettes to gain the courage to hold his hand. And when my dad took his last breath, we didn’t realize for a moment he was gone. But no inhale followed. And I couldn’t find a pulse. I kept my fingers on his wrist hoping to feel the tiny blip. But it didn’t come. And so that night my sister and mother and I watched a movie we’d seen a dozen times, we sang along to the soundtrack, and laughed when Jim didn’t know the plot. We needed nostalgia and distraction and a happy ending. We needed Baby up on that stage, her whole bright life ahead of her.
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Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) and the chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Follow her on twitter @wordperv and IG @wordperv79.