When the cancer returned my father didn't want to go back to the hospital. He said the feeling that he might leave this world on a bed that didn't belong to him was worse than death itself. I think we all knew it was his way of making his peace with the end. We all get there I suppose, and not everyone gets to decide the route they'll take. And yet for a while it didn't seem like he was ill at all. He still gardened most of the day, scratched at his sun burns and slapped his still-thick thigh every time he had to take an injection. Until one day I returned from school and as I placed my key into the front lock a dark miasma seemed to creep out of the still closed door frame.

I heard my father working at the dining table, the sun through the window behind him cast a pure light on the right side of his face as he turned and smiled at me. In that moment I understood, there was was something else in our house. Something had come to establish itself, to do its job, and this was my fathers way of saying goodbye.