Besides the family doctor, the only people in my father’s room are women. Carers, nurses, palliative teams; my mother, my sister and me turning him over in bed. Five of us today, daughters of mothers and mothers of daughters, cackling at his bedside at the thought of any man demanding a son. I try not to breathe in his smell of warm, rotting cabbage when I touch him or bend down into his lemon-yellow eyeline, attempting to interpret the sounds from his mouth. When we unbutton his pyjama top for the nurses to fit a syringe driver to his upper arm, I see that the skin on his chest is rolling hills, valleys between each rib and shadowed craters of collarbone dips. His upper body is all bone and wasted sinew, with binding muslin skin.
Mostly he doesn’t greet us when we come into his bedroom, only fractionally rolling his semi-open eyes. Dude, I know what you mean.
This morning, my mother brought me orange juice in bed and said he was the same as yesterday, peacefully sleeping. I told her I’d had a terrible nightmare that he was up and about again, and she asked if that wasn’t a nice dream, then we looked at each other and I rubbed my puffy face like people don’t do in real life.