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In the final months of Andrew Horowitz, his daughter Jody flew up several times from the small town in North Carolina where she lived to visit him in the hospital. She was almost thirteen, not quite a teenager, and thus not quite at the age where she resented her parents and everything they’d ever done to and for her. On July Fourth, she pushed her father in his wheelchair out onto the balcony at the end of the hall where he was staying to watch the fireworks that blossomed over the Yankee Stadium like burning flowers in the deep blue sky.
Jody sat on the ground next to the wheelchair and took her father’s hand in hers. It was slender in a way it was not when they still lived together. Cold and frail and dotted with cruel red lesions that dragged themselves across his pale skin.
“I’m sorry, Jody,” he said, still staring at the green burst of starlight in the night sky.
“What for, Dad?” she asked.
“For leaving. You and your mom.”
Jody let out a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Don’t be sorry for that. You did what you had to do. I don’t blame you for being gay, and I know for a fact that Mom doesn’t either.”
“You know I love you, right? To the stars and back.”
“Of course I know. And I love you too.” Jody leaned her head against the wheel of the wheelchair. It was cold and uncomfortable, with its bars pressing through her hair and digging into her scalp, but she was too big and he was too weak for her to sit on his lap like she used to. Like she really wanted to. So the feeling of his hip against her head through the wheelchair would have to do.
Andy wasn’t gone yet, but he had a vacant look in his life that showed that he already wasn’t entirely seeing the world of the living. Jody wondered if her father came back as a ghost, where would he haunt? The apartment he shared with his partner, Ray? Or their home back in North Carolina, where he’d never been safe but had always been loved. Though in the end, he was loved both places, but was safe nowhere. Not in the end. It took a different form here, but death came for him anyway.
The way it comes for us all. Jody watched the burst of another gold firework illuminate the dark and then fade into nothingness.
We all die
.
“I’m very lucky, you know,” Andy said. “To have you and your mom in my corner. There are men--and women, too--who are wasting away in here all alone because they have no legal family who accepts them for who they are. I’m lucky to have my parents, too.”
Jody’s bubbie and zaydeh had been in town that previous weekend. She hadn’t gotten to see them, but Bubbie had left some family jewellery for Jody to have. Jody took a brief moment to imagine the people alone in their rooms, watching
Cheers
reruns on the clunky TVs in their rooms until they literally died, and immediately had to put a stop to that train of thought. It was horrifying. “Do you get lonely?” she asked her father, though she already knew the answer.
“Sometimes,” he said. “All the time,” he amended. He looked back up at the sky where the firework grand finale was starting. “Dying is a lonely process.”
Jody understood. It was lonely for her too.