My father, (on the bed, experiencing the prolonged dying of Emphysema)
Was deeply shaken, by the fact that,
His cat, of many years, Miss Beasley, had suddenly just died the day before (of Kidney failure)
My mother, upon visiting her ailing x husband, having just checked the kitchen cabinet,
Walks into his bedroom and says
“John, can I take the cat food for Chi Chi? I mean you don’t need it anymore.”
He looks up at me, with one eye closed (he’s blind in his right eye)
his nostrils breathing in the oxygen from the tube that is cockeyed off to his right, missing the left nostril hole completely,
leaving a long red indent across the right cheekbone
(the tubes hook over his ears, like eyeglasses, but always pull too tight on the right side, imbalanced because the oxygen tube anchors off to the left side of the bed and snakes thru his apartment, (which I often step on by mistake,) to the pump in the left part of the dining room
and says
“Annina, and she wants the cat food!”
