I sat still in the dim white room, my hand clutching onto Dean’s thin one. He had several devices hooked up to him and a large oxygen mask on his face. The bottle-green hospital gown made him seem paler than he was.
Three days.
That’s how much time my brother had left.
At least that is what the men with medical degrees had said.
I’m sure they deliver such news at least twice a day and thus have become immune to the pain it brings to the listener. They are here to do their job and that’s what they did.
Dean had been struggling with cancer since he was a three-year-old boy and the doctors had managed to keep him alive till he was at the ripe age of twenty-five.
But now he lay here beside me, sleeping and fragile, with only three days left to breathe.
No, I reprimanded myself. He had 4320 minutes left. He had 259200 seconds left. Not just three mere days.
I closed my eyes, remembering my how my father had mourned my mother’s death, something that left an huge imprint in my memory and although I was a grown man of twenty-eight I felt no shame in finding comfort in my parents.
A particular memory flashed bright and real in my mind.
His veiny hands held onto a polaroid, and he just stared and smiled. He did not cry, nor did he speak. He simply examined it for ten straight minutes.
“We have colored pictures of mom as well, dad,” I whispered, not daring to raise my voice because we were both feeling vulnerable.
“I know.“ He whispered back.
I raised an eyebrow.
“I want to look at this one despite that.” He explained himself.
The air was heavy with confused silence until he broke it.
“I took this picture of her. It’s not the best one but it is the one where her smile is real not force for the camera. So, I like to look at it rather than the other ones.”
Morning came, and by the time Dean woke up I had already gotten permission from the doctors to take him out.
He was surprised- to such a point that he thought that I was off my rocker to take a terminally ill patient outside the confines of a room that smelled like bleach and grave faces of the nurses serving the other ICU patients who like Dean hoped to live but deep down knew that the sometimes holding on to hope was hopeless and futile.
“Photographs” I explained when he voiced this.
“Huh?” He looked ready to yell for a doctor to come and do some tests on me because my explanation seemed to make him further convince him that I had become deranged.
“I want to spend a day with you and take photographs. I want to remember your smiling face, not the tired one lying in a hospital bed.”
He did not answer and just followed me.
I did not take him far since he had to be on a wheelchair. Instead, we just went to a park close-by to have the lunch that I made after spending three hours and five band-aids because I cannot cook for the life of me.
We sat and remembered all the goofballs in his third-grade class and his annoying math teacher.
We sat and talked about our late mother and how she screeched like a banshee whenever she saw a cockroach.
We remembered how Uncle James got drunk at our cousin’s wedding and ended up giving the priest a wig to put in his shiny bald head.
We remembered his first girlfriend.
And we took a picture. I held the camera lens facing both of us as I crouched down to the level of his wheelchair. Our beaming faces made up for the lack of scenery behind us.
I did not take any more just that one.
But when I held my brother’s funeral a few days later, that one photograph offered more comfort than my human companions.
Because it did not provide ‘comforting’ pats on the back or ‘encouraging’ words. It offered me the incomparable consolation of memories.
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