"Untitled" by Haley Tanner

I saw him there, just lying. He couldn’t breathe or move. And I thought this is it, the end of a life from someone so close to me he was practically my own father. It hit me in the gut of all this pain I was going through but I couldn’t cry, just paralyzed with fear of what was going to happen next….

 My mother and I were coming back from seeing my Uncle Gary at the hospital. He was sick but I was too little to understand that the cancer was killing him inside. I just thought he had the flu. When we were at the hospital and he was happy to see me. I hugged his huge round belly and he kissed me on the forehead with his black hairy beard. He was the biggest guy I knew. But we called him the giant teddy bear because he gave the best hugs. I liked going to the hospital because when the adults were talking, my cousin colleen and I would race around in Gary’s wheel chair at the hospital.

My mom was a little unusual after our trip from seeing Gary. But our house got a phone call and I kept asking who it was, but she was listening on the phone and all she said in reply was “okay.” Okay? What does that mean? What happened? All these questions running through my head but I got no answer. I tried asking but something was wrong in my mother’s voice when her only answer was “nothing”.

She grabbed me and we went into the car. She drove so fast my heart was beating so hard that I could hear it. Then, we arrived at the hospital and I knew something bad happened to Gary. 

My mother pushed me aside and walked with the rest of the adults around Gary’s bed and I tried to go through but I was interrupted by Stephanie, the oldest of Gary’s kids.

“Hey Hayley, why don’t you have Colleen go push you around on the wheel chair k?” She asked me.

“Okay, but what’s going on?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it.” She replied back.

There was a tone in her voice that worried me, but I just ignored it and went on the wheel chair. When I got back my mother grabbed me and we walked out the door but I took a quick glance towards the bed and I could see Gary’s eyelids close and he was so still, it didn’t look like him, it didn’t look real. We went to the car and I kept asking her what was going on but there was no answer. When we got to our home my mom went inside her room and just waited, waiting on something that I had no idea what at the time. She just sat on her bed, stared at the ceiling and just waited. It bugged me that I couldn’t get an answer on things. But there was something on the look of my mother’s face that scared me. I just sat in my room for a while until I heard a phone ringing. I ran to the phone but my mom answered it and all she said was.

“It’s time.”

“It’s time for what?” I thought. My dad came home and we got all the family together and my mom told me that my favorite person in the world, my best friend so close he was like a father to me, had died. He was forever gone and I couldn’t stand it. I went inside my room and cried the whole night. But I knew that Gary wouldn’t want me to grovel over this. So, I acted as if I was fine, until the funeral…..