Somehow, though, we expected Daddy to make it; he was our warrior and often reminded us of his strength. “Get your scrawny ass out of here,” he’d snap, curling his biceps into mounds of muscle. “I’m Mandingo! Big Daddy!” But from the cancer, no amount of muscle could save him. He grew weaker and wearier by the day, and all I could do was watch.
It was a rainy, bitterly cold February night in 2006 when my father started taking that slow, torturous walk toward his final day. My stepmother crumpled her body on the bed alongside my father, the only thing keeping her from falling to the floor in overwhelming grief. She’d just witnessed my father throw up what looked like coffee grounds—curdles of blood that had accumulated in his body as his organs began shutting down. I caught a glimpse of the doctor shaking his head. “What does that mean?” I asked him.
The doctor swallowed his words. “He’s bleeding internally,” he said finally, his face grim.
“Talk to me!” I demanded. “Is this it for him?”
“Basically,” the doctor said simply. He gently touched my shoulder, no doubt to console me. But his fingers felt heavy, like bricks.
I turned back toward my father’s room, struggling through a pool of tears to get a glimpse of my dying father—my hero. My stepmother was still lying on him. “I’m not ready for him to go,” she said, crying. “I’m not ready.”
My father was awake. Though he couldn’t talk, I could tell from the tenderness in his touch that he was making calculations. He wasn’t going to die with my stepmother in the room. He couldn’t do that to her. He would fight. And when he let go, it would be with me by his side because he trusted me to let him walk out of the land of the living.
Another day passed before the rain broke and the sun emerged through the clouds; I got up and snatched open the curtains. It was a perfect day. I knew it would be my worst day, too. Dad is going home today, I said to myself, sighing, resigned but scared.
I went to the hospital to relieve my stepmother, who’d been with my dad all night. Always, there was someone there with him. I hung around that hospital the entire day, watching, listening. Praying. Daddy grew weaker and weaker throughout the day, going in and out of consciousness as I rubbed his hands, adjusted his sheets, and tried to get him to take his pills and sips of water. Finally, Daddy made his final rally: he bolted up in his bed. I looked in his eyes, so much like mine: piercing, dark, doelike. He stared back at me, a novel’s worth of love story flashing across his face, even though he couldn’t say a word. I didn’t know what to say or if I should say anything at all, whether to tell him one more time that I loved him, or if I should simply relish that quiet moment between father and child. I chose the latter. “Lean on my back, Dad,” I said, helping him fall onto my body. Together, we sat there, resting on each other. Quiet.
That would be our last moment together. Not long after he laid back down, my father, wild-eyed, started clawing at all the tubes and wires sticking out of his body. I’d read somewhere that just before some humans die, they start scratching at their skin—like their soul is trying to get out—and this is exactly what my father was doing. Trying to get free. My lips quivered as I leaned down to my father’s ear. “Dad, if you’re ready to go, let go,” I whispered. “We’re going to be all right.”
Daddy stopped scratching and pulling and shifted his eyes over to me. Then, after a beat, his entire body started jerking as he threw up a fresh round of coffee grounds. Blood was everywhere.
I bolted out of the room and out into the hallway, the fluorescent lights practically blinding me as I ran, crying and screaming. The beeping of the machines in my father’s room rang like sirens, echoing down the halls. “Code blue!” I heard someone yell.
It was such a violent way to die.
My father was fifty-eight. He was there with me when I took my first breath, and I was there when he took his last.
So furious was the loss, so immense, that the only way I thought possible to deal, to breathe, to put one foot in front of the other after he passed, was to bury my feelings about his death six feet down in my gut, where no one could access it. I had to compartmentalize his death and my emotions because there was work to be done: just three days after my father passed, I had to sing “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” a hit song from Hustle & Flow, at the 78th Academy Awards, which had nominated it for Best Original Song, a first in the category for a hip hop song. “I’m fine,” I would say when family and friends asked me how I was faring. “He’s in a better place,” and “He’s with God,” and “He’s not hurting anymore” were my go-to responses—the easiest way to get those who knew and loved me to think that, really, I was okay. Sometimes, saying those things out loud made me believe them, too. They kept my emotions in check. I needed to make peace with it and quickly, or I would break. I was the child of Mandingo Warrior. Breaking wasn’t an option. At least, that’s what I told myself.