Life Beyond the Void
Some losses do not end when the moment passes.
They linger. They change shape.
They ask new questions years later, when we think we are done asking.
This piece sits with what remains after absence becomes familiar. After memory hardens into a single image. After silence convinces us that what we remember is all there ever was.
Selected passage from Beware: Hidden Truths
Life Beyond the Void
The phone rang, its shrill tone cutting through the silence. The doctor’s voice, steady, detached, delivered the news. My mammogram results were in. A sonogram awaited me. My hands trembled as I hung up. The thought pierced my heart and unsettled my mind: Am I following in my father’s footsteps, or will I choose a different path? Will my choices protect my family, or hurt them in ways I do not intend?
At that moment, I thought the only memory of my dad was of him lying on his deathbed. His skin was ashen, deep dark brown like an old Hershey’s chocolate bar. It clung to his bones. A yellow haze beneath drooping eyelids surrounded his large, black, milky pupils. His lips were cracked and parched. A nurse entered and turned him over. A gaping wound yawned in his hip, raw and cavernous, its edges jagged as though torn rather than cut. Pale yellow worms wriggled within, weaving through torn flesh, their slick, segmented bodies glistening in the dim light. They twisted and pulsed, a writhing mass of hunger and decay, consuming what remained. I leaped from my chair and ran to my dad, hugging him tightly.
“I love you, Daddy,” I cried.
A female voice echoed, “Where did she come from? Get her out of here.
This is no place for a child.”
My dad never said a word. He never returned my hug. I never saw him again. I was eight years old.
I wanted to remember something else, anything else. I wanted to believe my father had been more than hollow eyes and distant silence. I needed proof, some trace of him beyond sickness and death, some evidence that I had love in my life.
***
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