Passover by: David Guymon

My dad was an amazing storyteller. He had the ability to create reality out of the most inconceivable exaggerations in a way that left him seeming god-like. It wasn’t until a decade after the story was told that I realized that the large scar on my father’s right knee was from an ACL surgery and not from his battle with a great white shark while swimming off the coast of Nicaragua with Colonel Ollie North, as dad had always told me. As an 8 year old who lived for the sole purpose of doing everything my father did, I prided myself in being able to recount the story of the shark’s tooth scar and my dad’s camaraderie with Colonel North to every kid in the neighborhood. I’d bring them by to have dad show my friends the actual scar. He’d let them touch it and ask questions like, “Did it hurt as bad as it looks?” Of course, my dad fed our imaginations with exasperating his story in such detail that we were left standing on the edge of the Nicaraguan sands in awe. He did everything that nobody else’s dad had. To this day, I still prefer to believe the Ollie North version of my father’s scar to what actually happened. Reality just doesn’t do dad justice.
It was Thanksgiving Day of 2007 and Dad was in town for the holiday. He had recently taken a job in Tampa Florida as the CEO of a youth behavioral hospital where he got to act like John Wayne and get paid for it. Thanksgiving was the first time I had seen him since he moved away from Utah three months earlier. We were gathered around the kitchen table at my aunt’s house listening to my father extemporize another lavish story about a quelled rebellion in the hospital that he worked at, where someone had stabbed a kid in the arm with a ballpoint pen. I like to pretend that it was with a scimitar instead, because that sounds more exotic and Florida is an exotic place to a boy from the desert. While wrapped in the adventure of a day at work for dad—version CEO—I found myself distracted by the twitching that occurred in his forearm just below his elbow. By the way that he paid no attention to it, I knew that he knew it was there. He just didn’t want any of his family to know.
Dad came back for Christmas and New Years. Weather was a favorite conversational piece of his during this trip, pointing out that while he had been very homesick, he hadn’t missed the snowstorms and grey skies that defined Utah winters. “We have a lot of white stuff down in Florida,” he’d say. “It’s just sold by the kilos down there.” His sense of humor was the same, but something seemed different. Dad would take coughing gasps during bouts of laughter, mostly at his own jokes. His face would turn red and sweat would begin to bead from his widow’s peak. I noticed his bags didn’t make it too far into the house when he arrived either. Perhaps he was too excited to be around family again to worry about bringing his luggage all the way into the house, but that wasn’t like him, to leave his things in the middle of a room. He was a CEO, a consummate organizer. A professional obsessive compulsive. On arrival, he seemed to have just dropped his duffle bag and brief case right as he stepped in the door as if he had strained to carry them that far. As he gave his round of hugs and sentimental greetings, I grabbed both of his bags in one hand and carried them downstairs to the guest bedroom.
That night, as he made his way down the stairs to his room I saw that he walked with a limp in his gait and leaned against the handrail to compensate for balance. As he made it to the bottom of the stairs I noticed that his pants fit a little loosely too, but figured that the Florida heat must have shed a few pounds off of my pop’s round belly. It wasn’t until a few days later that I’d find out that the gulf climate had nothing to do with his weight loss. On Christmas Eve my dad sat me down and told me one of his most dramatic stories yet. Down in Florida, the doctors had diagnosed my father with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. This story wasn’t strewn with exaggerations or workings of a gifted imagination. It was made of facts. Pure facts. It was a terminal illness. There was no cure. On Christmas Eve my dad told me that he was given 2 more years to live. What he couldn’t tell me was that the next morning would be our last Christmas together. Nine months later, he fell into a coma and passed away.
I was driving from Rexburg Idaho to the hospital in Salt Lake City when I got a phone call telling me that my dad was gone. I had left home for Utah an hour and a half earlier to tell my dad goodbye in person. The doctors had told me that he had no brain activity—only epileptic seizures—and that he couldn’t feel any pain. They had said that he’d probably be able to hear me if I were there to talk to him in person though. He died while I was still in the state of Idaho. I had three more hours to drive to the hospital after I found out that my father was dead. That was plenty of time to think about his stories.
I got to the Jordan River Medical Center at nine o’clock that night. My dad’s younger brother, who had been there to watch him pass away, escorted me through the intensive care unit. I finally saw my dad at 9:05, a little over three hours since he had died. The room cleared out as family saw that I had arrived. It was hard to look at my father’s body lying in his hospital bed, so I looked around, avoiding eye contact, and took in the subtleties of the room first. His computer bag was there, along with his shaving kit. I guess someone had had enough hope to bring his personal belongings in case he woke up. The fluorescent lights seemed to be a few more days away from burning out. And the window to his room was propped open. That must have been how he got to Heaven.
I finally sat down on my father’s bed, next to his thigh, and held his hand. His flesh was washed to a yellowish pale. As I interlocked his fingers with mine I could tell that rigor mortis was slowly setting in. Real men were supposed to be tough. Big boys didn’t cry. So for the next ten minutes little David fell over on his daddy’s chest and unleashed the waterworks. I was thinking about the stories he used to tell me as a little boy when I was trying to fall asleep. They were always the same. I wanted it that way. I would always tell my dad to tell me a story about a boy named David. I told him that the Ninja Turtles had to be in it, and that we had to be fighting evil at Chuck-E-Cheese. He always complied. And he always told the most magnificent stories.
I buried my dad the following Saturday, three weeks after his 45th birthday. Everyone was crying at his gravesite, except me. I had cried on his chest in private, but I always made it a point to never cry in public where people could judge me to be weak. My dad was the strongest person in the world to me. So I would be too. Still, everybody else was crying. As a cold breeze began to dust the Elysian Gardens where my father lied in repose, my grandpa stood at my side and put his arm around my shoulder. His wife had died of breast cancer when dad was my age too. My father was the oldest child to seven siblings when his mother passed away. I had been born nine months earlier.
It didn’t occur to me until two weeks later that grandma had gotten sick at 44 and died of a terminal illness at 45, just like her son did. It also didn’t occur to me that their death dates were five days apart in September. When I brought it up to my mom, she wrote it off as a coincidental anomaly. But I knew better. It was a modern day Passover. Like myself, and my dad, grandma was the firstborn child in her family.
That night I went to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning life went on. My wife and I packed our bags and drove back to Idaho one dad fewer than when we came. When we got home I carried both of our bags all the way to our bedroom and threw all of their contents into the dirty clothes hamper in the closet. We had amassed half of a month’s worth of dirty linens since we last did laundry. We were so rushed to leave the week before that our kitchen was still a mess, the smell of old garbage filled the house, and our fridge and cupboards were empty. While my wife washed the rotting dishes to stay the attack of a plague, I went to the grocery store to get dinner. Sequentially pacing the aisles to fill my shopping cart with the catalog of goods that my wife had sent me with, I paused in the frozen meat section. There was a sale on lamb meat and I figured that that would hit the spot. I asked the butcher for his bloodiest piece of veal and told him that I liked the meat particularly juicy. He eyed a leg of lamb in his display freezer and wrapped it tightly in plastic and paper. A corner of the wrapped order was damp with lamb’s blood as the butcher handed me the meat. It was inconsequential as I wiped the blood left on my hand on the back of my pants. They were the same denim jeans that I had worn to the hospital.
I carried the entire lot of plastic grocery bags into the house in one trip with bags of canned soup threatening to cut my fingers off. Ten bags in all dropped to the dirty linoleum floor of our kitchen as my wife helped me put our groceries away. She had finished cleaning the dishes sometime before and now our cupboards and fridge were full. That night we sat down to our first meal at home in a week and enjoyed every bite. Macaroni and cheese was one of our mutual favorites. And it was a quick meal to make too. There was no veal on the table that night, just macaroni and cheese. To this day I’ve never eaten lamb. The meat from the grocery store never even made it into the house. I used it for what I needed to and threw the bloody remains into the dumpster in the parking lot.
As we climbed into bed that night, I kissed my wife’s forehead and told her that I loved her. I forgot to lock the door and said that I’d be right back. We didn’t want any burglars intruding on our first night back at home. As I got up, I could feel pressure in my ankles and a cold starting to set in to my neck. I walked out of the bedroom, feet dragging along the cold carpet till I passed the kitchen. Stopping to grab the garbage that had flown under the radar, I tied a knot in the top of the plastic bag and set it outside of the front door before I locked the night out, and us in our safe haven. I closed the door on the world and on the week that had passed with my Dad. And I could hear the sound of droplets land on the plastic garbage bag. The sky was clear out the window. The moon shone uninterrupted. And there was no rainfall to be found. The sound was the lamb’s blood. I guess it hadn’t yet dried from the stroke I had painted on the top of our doorframe. Hopefully, God would pass me over.