Words on the Verge

The Day My Father Died David B. Seaburn             November 11, 1998 dawned grey and cold. I had been staying with my brother and mother in Ellwood City, Pa. off and on for six weeks after my father had been diagnosed with acute leukemia. The doctor had given him no more than two months to live. It had been a long twenty-two years since my father had had his heart attack, years littered with mounting health problems and surgeries, years of caregiving by my mother. My father was eighty years old now and proud of it. His brothers had all died before him, mostly of heart disease, one at the age of thirty-six. The day before he died was my parents’ fifty-sixth wedding anniversary, something that he was unaware of. We crossed our fingers that day, hoping he would live through it.             A few days before his death, my mother and I received a call in the middle of the...