Etched

We all got to talking about photographs and family. I mentioned that there are almost no photographs of my father and me. There's no grim reason for it, no dysfunction or avoidance, just an oversight of opportunity, just us not being there when the camera was, too.

There is one.

It is me, my father and my mother at my first rehearsal dinner. We are at a restaurant in Cambridge that closed not long after we were there. We are smiling and nicely dressed, the translucent tubes snaking over my father's shoulders and below his nostrils the only subtle hint that something isn't quite right.

We are smiling because we believe I am just a few days from being happy. We are smiling because although we know he isn't well, and hasn't been for some time, we don't know that he is just three months away from death.