Gasping for air

Feedback Please

Your dad’s dying of lung cancer and you’re buying him cigarettes. Like a death reseller. Hidden in the pocket of your trench coat, this secret everybody knows about.

Your dad dies and you’re charged with cancelling his medical appointments. The secretary on the phone wonders why Monsieur is cancelling so close to the date of the consultation.

“He died”, you blurt out, and the conversation ends.

Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Papa has died, Papa is dead. Is he stuck in the action of dying or dead forever? Does he remain, still, in the ashes that you accidentally shuffled when you went to plant a flower where he lies?

Your dad’s dying of lung cancer and you’re buying him cigarettes—in the tabac he used to go to when you were a kid, only a couple of hundred meters away from the house you grew up in. The neighbourhood is grimmer than you remember.

Is it because it’s Sunday or is it because he’s dying?

He will never smoke those cigarettes. Somebody else will, because even after he died you continued to be this death reseller, giving out cigarettes to your closest friends and ensuring that they can save every last buck and survive through precarious jobs and hope for a better future.

Slowly planting your seed where nothing grows.

You read through his medical records. Not because they’re a nice evening read, but because he was so chronically scared of paperwork his house was made of checks never cashed in and envelopes never opened. You are looking for his life insurance information; you find records of a man whose anxiety got the best of him.