How to Read to Your Father in His Hospital Bed during a Global Pandemic

Use the speakerphone setting and place the phone a short distance from your tired mouth.

This is the fifth call you’ve made to your father who forgets when it’s morning or evening.

Tell him again that it is Good Friday and let him respond, “Oh good.”

Your father, who left the priesthood for parenthood, returned to bless pews every April.

Tell him, “It was once our destiny to walk in the garden.” Await his response, “Dani Baby.”

Forget the words that no longer hold meaning and focus instead on the ones that do.

I.	“Why can’t my religion be soft and easy?”
II.	“How many times am I supposed to lose my loved ones?”
III.	“We expect each other never to fall.”
IV.	“You will taste the salt of your own tears.”
V.	“We’re talking about loneliness here.”
VI.	“Let’s stay hurtable rather than hard.”
VII.	“I carry your image within and without me.”
VIII.	“The negatives can have meanings too.”
IX.	“Help us learn all over again how to love enough.”
X.	“Teach me to simplify my life.”
XI.	“What a death it must have been.”
XII.	“In the shattering silence—be still.”
XIII.	“Holding your bruised body in my arms, I feel a weight lifted from me.”
XIV.	“All creation held its breath in the deathly quiet of that tomb.”

Listen to your father repeat between each station, “We touch the wood of your cross and we remember.” And we remember.