miraculous uplifting spirit, additionally, they, like us, shed their share of tears each time they left his room. Everybody at the hospital knew us and greeted us on a first name basis because for the remainder of his life Annie, Lynne, and I couched by his side except to go home, attend to personal hygiene and esthetic responsibilities, and wolf down some culinary energy. He was in the emergency room, we were in the emergency room, he slept in the hospital, we slept in the hospital: three cots lined in the hall, scattered in a room - wherever they would let us sleep as long as it was close to him as he was always within our reach, and his face or hand by our side ... always. There was a cold, thick silence my father and I inhabited for years - the edgy, uncomfortable silence that comes from hard feelings, unsaid words and unsaid thoughts. Like starved human beings, he and I devoured every word as I crawled up on his hospital bed, and he held me through endless conversations as we released the poison boiling deep in our craters. I touched his cheek and wept as I glided my smooth face along his half-shaven. A quiver ran across my face as Dominatrix Time cracked her furious whips. He saw in my baffled eyes that which had been in his own. The bottle destroyed all that there was, and robbed all that could have been; floating along the path of austere nerves where hunger now sinks its teeth into the belly of forgiveness. When sobriety and sanity kiss the face of mortality, conscious quivers and brazenly questions why Â
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