My Father's Long Goodbye

He awakens for a few minutes every hour I sit by his bedside. “Who are you?” he demands, realizing that he’s not alone.
“It’s Karla,” I say.
“Who?”
“Karla. I’m your daughter, Dad. Remember Karla?”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” But I can tell from the vacant look in his watery blue eyes that Karla is an abstract concept, at best.

He relaxes his head on the avocado pillowcase that has gives his already pale complexion a greenish tinge. Chet’s melancholy rendition of I Get Along Without You Very Well fills the air and, while I find his downbeat crooning a soothing accompaniment to sorting laundry, I decide that the mood isn’t quite right for a return from a life-threatening rectal hemorrhage. I scroll through my music and find the original Broadway soundtrack of My Fair Lady between Michael Jackson and Neil Young. A young Julie Andrews’ joyous I Could Have Danced All Night instantly lifts the somber mood.

Like a bear rousing from a deep mid-winter sleep, my father’s eyes open and he lifts his heavy head from the pillow. Turning toward the source of the music, he looks at me and a smile begins to shape his dry, pallid lips. His expression is suddenly alert, eyes more focused. His head begins to bob with the beat of the classic Lerner and Loewe song from the album my father played so often during my childhood that even I know all the lyrics some 55 years later.

I could have danced all night.
I could have danced all night.
And still have begged for more.
I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things
I’ve never done before.

I find myself singing the lyrics along with Eliza Doolittle, Julie Andrews’ Cockney flower girl character, her exuberance as contagious as it was when the show debuted in 1956, the year I was born. I can still picture Audrey Hepburn (in the later film version) twirling up the stairs, trailed by a bevy of servants as she revels in the newfound magic of her life. And somewhere in the deep recesses of his cobwebbed mind, I think my father is twirling too.

I’d downloaded On the Street Where You Live and just as Julie stops dancing all night, her young suitor, the proper gentleman Freddy Eynsford-Hill begins his love song: