Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

going home.

My Father’s Death: Take 3
    I t happens like this. Old Dr. Bennett, our family doctor, comes out of the guest room and gently shuts the door behind him. Older than old, Dr. Bennett has been part of our lives forever, he was even there when I was born, at which time he had been asked by the local medical board to please retire, soon—that’s how old he is. Dr. Bennett is now too old for almost anything. He doesn’t walk so much as shuffle, doesn’t breathe so much as gasp. And he seems unable to deal with the consequences of his patient’s terminal condition. As he comes out of the guest room, where my father’s been staying the last few weeks, Dr. Bennett breaks down in a storm of tears, and for some time can’t speak he’s crying so much, shoulders heaving, his crumpled old hands cupped over his eyes.
    Finally, he’s able to look up and gasp for breath. He looks like a lost child, and he says to my mother and me, we who are now prepared for the very worst, “I don’t . . . I don’t really know what’s going on. I can’t tell anymore. He seems pretty bad off, though. Best go see for yourself.”
    My mother looks at me, and it is that look of final resignation I see in her eyes, that look that says she is ready for whatever awaits her beyond the door, however sad or horrible. She is ready. She takes my hand and holds it tight before standing and going in. Dr. Bennett falls into my father’s chair and slumps there as if emptied of the will to go on. For a moment I think he’s dead. For a moment I think Death has come and passed my father over, and decided to take this one instead. But no. Death has come for my father. Dr. Bennett opens his eyes and stares into the wild, distant empty space before him, and I can guess what he’s thinking. Edward Bloom! Who would have thought! Man of the world! Importer/exporter! We all thought you’d live forever. Though the rest of us fall like leaves from a tree, if there was one to withstand the harsh winter ahead and hang on for dear life we thought it would be you. As though he were a god. This is how we have come to think of my father. Although we have seen him early in the morning in his boxer shorts, and late at night asleep in front of the television after everything on it has gone off the air, mouth open, blue light like a shroud over his dreaming face, we believe he is somehow divine, a god, the god of laughter, the god who cannot speak but to say, There was this man . . . Or perhaps part god, the product of a mortal woman and some glorious entity descended here to make the world the kind of place where more people laughed, and, inspired by their laughter, bought things from my father to make their lives better, and his life better, and in that way, all lives were made better. He is funny and he makes money and what could be better than that? He even laughs at death, he laughs at my tears. I hear him laughing now, as my mother leaves the room shaking her head.
    â€œIncorrigible,” she says. “Completely and totally incorrigible.”
    She’s crying, too, but these are not tears of grief or sadness, those tears have already been shed. These are tears of frustration, of being alive and alone while my father lies in the guest room dying and not dying right. I look at her and with my eyes ask, Should I? And she shrugs her shoulders as if to say, It’s up to you, go in if you’d like, and seems to be on the verge of a kind of laughter herself, if she weren’t already crying, which is a confusing sort of expression for a face to have to bear.
    Dr. Bennett seems to have fallen asleep in my father’s chair.
    I stand and go to the half-closed door and peer beyond it. My father is sitting up, braced by a load of pillows, still and staring at nothing as though he were on Pause, waiting for someone or something to activate him. Which is what my presence does. When he sees me,