My father was no ordinary man. I owe him my life.

There’s this old Death Cab for Cutie Song. It’s called What Sarah Said, and at one part of the song, the guy sings, he sings:
Love is watching someone die.

I wasn’t there to watch my father die. I moved out 4 years before, when I went to college. Of course, there were visits home, but mostly, he came to me. Now I was standing in some hallway in some hospital, with nothing left of him except a brown paper bag with all the things they found on him when they pulled him from the wreck.
I go to the room when a nurse motions to me, one last time to look at my father’s familiar and easy face, to say goodbye. I think I will cry, but when I see him lying there, so peaceful and normal, as though he were taking his afternoon nap – but there’s something different. I realise that my father is not there on that table. It’s just his shell.

I take the green bus home, holding the brown paper bag to me, the only thing I know says something about who he was. I take my father home in a brown paper bag.

Of course, I have to go back to the old house, my childhood home. Life doesn’t wait for death. There are accounts to be tied up, the will to be read, the house to be done up and sold – there’s no one left besides me, to do it. I won’t live here. It’s not that I don’t have the best memories, but I was taught that there are some things best left best. I don’t want to fill this house with me, it would be impossible.

I lock up the flat, tell the Akoobs next door that I’ll be away for three weeks or so. Mrs. Akoob nods sympathetically. I leave a set of keys with them, in case of emergency, and then get on the green bus and make my way up the coastline to my father’s house.
Next to me on the seat is a suitcase of clothes, a filofax with plenty of numbers I might need, and my father in his brown paper bag, which I have not opened yet, though it has been a week since the accident.