The Way Things Were

I want my father to come home.

I want him to walk through the door, dressed in his work clothes, smelling the way he often did when he came back from work. I want him to put away his lunch box, and change into comfortable at-home clothes, and put on his slippers he always wore because his feet were eternally cold.

Breakfast will be cooked and coffee will be made, and the family will all sit in the living room, and we'll watch 'The Price is Right'. We'll complain about the contestants' behavior and poor decisions, we'll make guesses on the prices of different things.

Dad will talk about work, about how they had to install new seats in a 747, or how the previous shift put in the carpet wrong and it all had to be redone, or how he had to work on piece-of-junk Airbuses. He'll complain about how traffic sucked getting home, how there was endless construction, and how much CalTrans infuriates him.

I want him to sneeze, and to tease him about how it sounds more like 'hic' than 'achoo'. I want to see him wearing his giant doofy-looking reading glasses. I want to see him playing the RPG 'Fate' on his laptop, and see the venomous wyvern he usually has for a pet. I want to laugh at how he named his pet Doofus, because the AI sometimes results in the pet getting stuck behind a wall or otherwise being annoying.

I want my father home. I want him home, sitting before me, alive and healthy, like nothing bad ever happened. I want to erase the crummy stuff that occurred, erase the pain and the memories. I want to have never seen him going in and out of the hospital, never have witnessed him having a series of health problems, never watched his health decline. I want him to have never been airlifted to the hospital, never have spent a full month in there. I want to have never seen my father lying dead in a hospital bed, never held his lifeless hand while I cried.

I just want my father to come home, and for it to have never been any different. I want to not know the pain and grief, I want to not know loss. I want death to be a vague, distant concept, to not feel so close and so real and so tangible. I want to not have the fear and worry that my mother will get sick and die, to not have the continual fear of losing people, to not think so much about how life is unpredictable and uncertain. I want to not have a hole in my heart and in my life, I want to have never witnessed the grief of family members and friends. I want to not have this pain that can't be fixed, to not be torn up inside because I can't do much to ease others' pain either.

I want things back the way they were, when things were happier, and simpler, and felt more complete. I want to be whole again, and I want the people around me to be whole again.

Is that too much to ask?