Steve

Knowing that when you die you're gone, that when you finally close your eyes all they'll ever see is black until the end of time, is enough to make a person afraid to get out of bed in the morning.

So as I stood over his body, watching them pump oxygen into his dead lungs, it hurt more than it should. I felt myself cringing from the sight of his sunken eyes and the bloody tissue that surrounded his face.
It felt like I was on House, and any minute some crazy doctor was going to limp in and tell me that whatever strange disease he had, it curable.
But you can't cure death. Not if it was the only disease he had worth curing.
Not if it was inevitable.
And everyone dies.

Looking back, what hurt the most, even more than his imminent death, was the way she held to me; the child who was never really a child to begin with comforting a mother who never had it in her to raise. Her face swollen and red from crying, the layers of makeup she had always insisted upon wearing streaking her face a pitiful shade of gray.
Funny, I'd never thought she'd care if he died.

Yet there was, crouching against the wall, her blue eyes even brighter because of the tears she swore she'd never cry for the father she refused to call her own. And all the years of anger and pain between us that drove us apart and insane were somehow forgotten, and when I told her that I loved her, she said it back, and maybe for the first time in my life I knew it was true.

And now as they call and tell me that the decisions are still being made, that how he dies is undecided, I know that I should be there with her. I should never have left in the first place. But the though of being there any longer had been unbearable.
I'm consumed with guilt, it's locking my throat and sending those damn tears to betray what I'm really feeling, even when I smile and say I'm fine...we all knew he would go this way.