They have lost my underwear in the wash. Why wasn’t it labelled? one nurse asks the other. I’ll tell the daughters when they come in today, she says. (God forbid!) He should wear a johnnie (!) because the other patients don’t know why he’s here. He looks like a doctor when he roams around the halls asking everybody how they’re doing. He refuses to wear a gown, she says. Why should he? asks the other nurse, who has as of this moment become my favourite. I wonder, Is this a game? Underwear lost, move back two spaces. Refuses to wear a johnnie, miss a turn. I think next time we play, I’ll be the CEO instead of the mental patient. On August 26, 1963, my father died of stomach cancer, here again, just down the hallway. My brother and my sister and my mother and I were gathered round him for the final time, but he died without saying a word. As in life, so too in death. On the eve of my father’s funeral, Elvira and I made love, and nine months later, here in this hospital in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, our second daughter, Miriam, was born.
