My Father's Love
The last time I kissed my Father was three months ago as I was set to make my way back to the north coast from my parent’s home in the Kootenays. Together we stood in their driveway saying goodbye as the sun, thirsting on our parched skin, set over the Kootenay Mountains.  As I drove away the yellow sheen reflected in my Father’s skin, once attributed to the glow of the setting sun, would soon be known as a sign of the disease that would take his life.  
In the next month cancer consumed more and more of my Father as it walked through his organs and danced in his bones. All of this was reported to us by the specialist; outwardly this man was my same old Dad. I returned home so we could spend our remaining days together raking the leaves of fall, walking mountain trails with the family mutt and enjoying the spoils of a warm fall harvest. There was no evidence that at the end of that month, everything would change. 
With the currency of pills, I bought two months of time for my Father.  With great precision and predictability I gave him the medication needed to make him alert and the medication that helped him sleep. According to him though, the best of all was the medication that assisted him to eat. It was blissful for me to have my Father close enough that I could reach out to touch him, that was until a fateful December evening when my Father asked with words pushed towards me on stale bits of air, “How much longer can you do this honey?”.  I looked at my Father, alarmed. I mean, I really saw him. My Father, in three short months had become frail and malnourished, wearing lips that were cracked from dehydration. His words came from a mouth that betrayed the nature of his condition, and his eyes glowed yellow like those of a startled cat. I had to look away, realizing and accepting for the first time that my Father was dying.  
Lying before me, swaddled in a sleep robe and bed linen was a man so much less himself that he was hardly recognizable to any of us. Bathed in candlelight, and with the soft sounds of Frank Sinatra hanging in the air, it was like a surreal version of the nativity scene as I, my Mother and our mutt dog stood around the sacred man to protect him from what was feared to come. My Father’s breath slowed and with the rise of a heavy chest I leaned in to kiss his cheek. With closed eyes and his hand wrapped in mine, I heard the last words my Father would say to me, barely audible “I love you honey”. Rising with tears in my eyes my Mother’s hand found ours as she said to me, “Forever with me, I am blessed to have the words of my Father's love”.