I.

The old 6-story hospital where I work at recently opened their new 11-story hospital next door. It’s strange. Entire wings are now just Pardon Our Dust signs and empty hallways. The old Medical ICU is just a large empty room with several other empty rooms. No beeps. No monitors. No one. The old oncology floor is just a couple of lifeless hallways. The green mile of so many patients is now just halls of darkness.

“I walked through the old oncology unit and … I got cold,” my colleague shivered, “Just thinking of all the people who died there. It’s different when you have nurses and patients there.” He won’t be taking that shortcut anymore.

I had a patient on the onc floor a couple years ago. An older lady dying of cancer which had spread beyond even hope’s generous borders. Something went wrong with her morphine pump in the middle of the night. She suffered in pain for hours. Her husband was understandably furious, the nurses warned me. I’m the attending so he wanted to yell at me.

“How could you people do this to her? She’s supposed to be comfortable and she was in agony all night,” he went on, “This is no way to treat someone who’s suffering. This is no way….”

I just stood there and took it all. There was no point in explaining the technical or human fallibility. The one in a million circumstances of too many pages, too many CPRs, too many crises, on the night the pump malfunctioned with too few nurses. I just stood there and said sorry many, many times, until the old husband was too tired to vent anymore.

“How’d it go?” the clerk asked as I crumbled at the work station already drained from my first patient o’ the day.

“I, uh, think he was tired out,” I answered, barely lifting my head or my eyelids. “Because he wasn’t as mad as I was expecting.”

He almost seemed too nice. That just made me feel worse.

I still remember the helplessness in his voice. Not all ghosts are the dead kind.

II.

Eight years ago. In the clinic.

“Someday we’ll laugh about this. My mom and I will move somewhere that isn’t so fucking cold. I’ll send you a postcard,” she colorfully mused in the exam room, “I need some new friends anyways instead of these assholes.”

“That sounds good. Now about your counts…,” I answered taking a pen out of my still crispy clean doctor’s coat.

She was my age. Gold hair, round face, recently tanned and gracefully fallen. HIV, hepatitis, cirrhosis, terminally bad choices in life. The infectious disease docs would just shake their heads when her name came up. Most of you who still haunt this site know of her. I still think of her sometimes. Seems a lot longer than eight years ago. Trading postcards would have been nice.

A month after she died (of a ruptured esophagus), I got a letter from her mom:

“Silvia wrote on one of the pages of her journal - ‘I am thankful to have such a caring doctor as Dr. Scott. He seems more like a friend to me than a doctor.’

I hope that you somehow saw a glimpse of the real Silvia and that she influenced your life in a positive way.”

She wrote about me in a paper journal. That makes it seem even longer ago.

III.

Twenty eight years ago. Detroit.

Someone is angrily yelling right outside of my dad’s apartment window again. Dad’s shiny black shoes clack across the wooden floor into the bedroom. A drawer opens and shuts quickly. His voice rumbles, “You kids stay here.” Then he’s out the door again.

Oh man, there’s going to be a fight, my brother and I are both thinking.

Later dad tells us there was no fight, “Just some drunk sonovabitch. Goddamned Crazy Richard again.” He thinks for a second, and says, “Show me how you make a fist.”

I’m nine years old and I make a fist - the wrong way.

“Don’t put your thumb inside your fingers. Thumb is outside like this or you’ll break it. Always keep the wrist straight, son….”

Last month. Our basement.

My five-year old son and I roll into a giant stuffed tiger. I’m showing him the single-leg takedown.

“Okay, your turn now,” I tell him, “Drop your level. Go for the leg. Ear on my belly button or you’ll get guillotined.”

He’s laughing because I said belly button. I’m laughing because he’s wrapped around my leg like a monkey moon boot.

“Do the funny one now,” Sun Su giggles.

“What funny one?”

“The triangle (choke), hehehee.”

“Maybe later.”

Putting someone to sleep in six seconds will have to wait until he’s in high school. I’ll probably teach our girl when she’s in middle school though.

IV.

At night, Sun Su has to hold my arm before he falls asleep. Sometimes in the dark, he’ll feel a scab, callous, hangnail, or my vein and ask why that part of my hand feels different today. He knows the back of my hand better than I do.

Dad’s hands. I remember them too. Strong, rough, veiny. The yellow stain on his index finger from smoking too much. The scars and occasional split fingernail from handyman work. The tattoos on his forearms in Japanese lettering.

I think it’s hard being a father without thinking of your own father all the time. Measuring your parenting against his. Guiding yourself. Maybe it’s more like pacing yourself. Repeating the good things while filling in the missing things in that ghostly shroud he left for you to step into. A blueprint of remnants of contact, slivers of moments, parcels of words. At least until the blueprint expires when they turn thirteen, the age my dad died. Then I’ll have to wing it.

Every time I walk Sun Su to the bus stop, I think this is one of those child-dad memories that I didn’t have. Every day I hug my kids I think how I didn’t even see my dad for days or weeks or months at a time. Just having mom and dad in the same house for more than a pickup or dropoff is something I only remember on a few Christmases. Thanks Jesus, I’m not really a believer but I have to admit, your birthdays do rock.

It’s good to have ghosts, I guess.

Thanks for haunting. You too.

(I don’t normally do the Writing Collaboration thing but thanks to Carlos and Rice Bowl Journals for the idea.)