The words feel full and heavy inside my mouth and remind me of when I was a child with too many sickly coloured gumballs in my cheeks. I call you my “late father” and these words are wrong and taste terrible.
You were not late. You disliked appearing to run on “reservation time”, so you liked to arrive early and make conversation about the hockey game or the weather. The reservation was in your blood, the same blood you called “cursed” right before you breathed your last breath in that hospital bed and took the last remains of my family with you.
Before you left and took your early departure, you talked about cats and the farm, and how I looked like your kokum, a woman who had long hair and heavy skirts and beat a moose to death when she caught it swimming in the river.
She walked to town with bloody hands and soaking wet skirts and everyone thought she had finally lost her mind until she got the Billy boys to come and see what she had done.
In your final moments you saw her in me and I’ve studied her face in that old book and it’s so similar to the one I see in the mirror every morning except I have your eyes, that unmistakable mark of the half of your European blood that marked you as an outcast.
how can i call you my late anything?
you were always early and you left early too
Couldn’t you have stayed a little while longer?
I hear you in my own laugh, and the little sayings, the mumbled words in Cree, and the way I buy old tools at yard sales and order Diet Cokes and ask for extra ketchup. I see you in old grease stained ballcaps and the hockey game score and the buckskins and wear on old church doors.
And I call you my late father with a mouthful of gumballs and with my whole chest that burns with sorrow.
April 2025
hospital vespers 