Once the sun has risen and the sky evens out into blue, he moves to the carpeted floor of his bedroom. He meditates for half an hour. Sometimes he is able to do so successfully but more often, like today, he is not. His therapist often asks what a “successful” meditation is, really, and he doesn’t know how to answer. Today the discomfort in his left side is pronounced, and as he sits he considers the nature of discomfort. The nature of pain as any other sensation: as lover’s kiss or sun on cheeks or mosquito bite or ingrown toenail or too-long beard or tumour in lungs, stomach, brain or thrown out back. Pain as crossed legs and good stretch and fumbled play in hockey. Pain as fresh ice and sharp skates. Pain as humid summer day. His thoughts drift and he allows them to, and maybe this is the failure, he thinks, and brings his thoughts back to his breath. When the pain (sensation) in his lung becomes too sharp he stops to drain fluid from his pleural space through a catheter placed somewhere between his ribs on his left side. Though the process usually ends his meditation, today he thinks about how this too can be meditation, this loss can be gain, this pink fluid which only moments ago was pressing against his visceral pleura. This window in his pericardial sac. How poetic to have had a pericardial window procedure, his eldest daughter pointed out, An actual window to your heart, dad, that’s kind of beautiful.

He had to cede his desire for boundaries of self, following the diagnosis. For the perceived ownership one likes to have over one’s body. Now, things that should be in are out, things that should be nowhere are present, this window to his heart, this mass in his lungs, that embarrassed nurse inspecting abrasions on his crotch, legs, unwashed feet. He wonders if one always feels smelly or ugly when being closely inspected by another. He wonders if no one else does and this feeling, then, is another failing of his. He wonders if the nurse found him charming, if that was part of her embarrassment. He knows he is a handsome man, even now that he is thinner. Perhaps especially now that he is thinner. Either way, there are no longer illusions of privacy, no possibilities for coyness or flirtation, and with that he must be okay. For that he must be thankful. Summer’s in full force he realises as he looks out his window, from the air conditioned room to the heat that is visible on the air. 

He thinks of the baby’s breath flowers his youngest daughter snuck into the hospital room underneath her t-shirt after his procedure and of the blossoms that were wilted from the heat of her stomach and the humidity of the day. He thinks of when his daughters came in sheepishly smelling of air and sun with sand in their hair, guilty of the beach day they had not shared with him. He thinks of that baby’s breath arranged in the unused cardboard urinal by his bedside. He thinks of his youngest sketching those flowers in her notebook to the sound of his IV’s consistent beeping. There is beauty in all this, he reminds himself. There is beauty in sickness and deterioration and sadness and wilting. Beauty in ugly flowers and humid days. Sensation ↔ Beauty, he writes on a stack of post-it notes he keeps beside his bed. His apartment is covered with post-it notes like this. Some practical, others brief thoughts that he has assigned some sweet meaning to. Every sweet thought is meaningful now, he thinks, and writes Death ↔ Meaning on a post-it note that he places on the carpet beside him.

He decides the meditation is over now and sends a text to each daughter to say good morning, as he does most days, sometimes with a favourite line from whatever book he’s reading. Last month he was reading Proust and sent his youngest a page-long sentence he loved dearly, and he could tell she didn’t read it despite the care he took in copying it from the book, in texting it exactly word-for-word, because she responded only with Morning dad, Love you, and certainly she could not have such an indifferent response to Proust. He writes emails for more important messages, the things he feels they may return to, the lessons that he feels he must pass on. He wonders if he has been a good father. He wonders if his daughters think so. No boundaries of self, and that is okay, that is good, focus on breathing, that which is there is there. Sensation ↔ Beauty, Self ↔ Permeation. 

He puts a pot of water on the stove, enough for his morning tea and the coffee enema that he will not do but lie to his naturopath that he has done. The water takes too long to boil. He threw away his electric kettle when he read that they can cause cancer. Everything’s carcinogenic, dad, his youngest reminded him, We can only do our best. Another post-it note added to the kitchen wall, Matter ↔ Carcinogen. As the water heats he lays on his back on the worn yoga mat that stays rolled out by his internet router. He has not yet figured out how to navigate his catheter in the course of his exercise routine, and therefore simply lies, centres his hip bones, breathes through his sternum, feels the way his body arranges differently around itself. So much of care is stasis and static now. He makes green tea when the water has boiled and drinks it on the couch with his feet in the automatic foot massager that an old high school friend bought him upon hearing about the diagnosis. It’s unpleasant, really, though something about it soothes him. Unpleasant is sensation, pinching is sensation, Sensation ↔ Beauty. 

He remembers now the weeks immediately following his diagnosis, reading cancer nutrition books with his daughters around the heavy stone coffee table he inherited from his father. He remembers the notes his daughters took, the charts they made, the careful attention they gave to the books partially, perhaps, in order to avoid what else had to be discussed. He remembers mentioning to them that his brother would be a good grandfather if they ever had children. If he wasn’t there. He has a brief image of their lives told through circles of reading, around campfires, on a metro in Paris, the room at the hospital, his queen-sized bed in the apartment that didn’t have a living room. This was just another form of that reading, he thinks, this could be a lullaby, his daughters falling asleep and him carrying them to their bunkbed, the eldest to the top bunk and the youngest to the bottom. 

He puts on Lou Reed’s Berlin album. Since his diagnosis he has only wanted to listen to the music he loved in his twenties. Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed. In the hospital he made each of his daughters listen to the album from start to finish, one after the other, using the bluetooth headphones his eldest bought for him when he complained of the noises of pain the man who shared the room with him made throughout the night. He loved to watch the similarities in his daughter’s actions, in their expressions, the ease in their interactions. They mirrored one another. They loved each other. He raised two daughters who love each other and perhaps that is all he needs, for that he can always be thankful. Daughters, he writes and sticks to the side of the stereo. 

When he is finished with his tea he skips to the last song of the album and looks out the living room window over the playground where his daughters played as children, the adjacent field where they would smoke weed with their friends as teenagers. It almost moves him to think of their naivety then. Choosing a park that was less than a block from their home, always with the excuse of an afterschool activity or homework at a friend’s house. He wonders if they knew the field was visible from the window. He wonders if his eldest passed the tender wisdom along to her sister, or if perhaps it was intrinsically a part of each of them—the poor lying, the strong body spray and mouthwash to cover the scent, the bags of chips they would carefully sneak into their room and eat loudly. He wonders if he has been a good father. Daughters, he writes again, and sticks it on the window so that from where he’s standing it’s resting on that field. 

“Sad Song” is the last song on the album. The song he made each daughter listen to twice and suggested they close their eyes and they each smiled their little tight-lipped smiles and swayed slightly. He wonders if the smiles were for him or not, performance or not. If they were sincere. He felt so tender towards them then, sitting next to his hospital bed, switching seats every hour to take turns in the comfortable chair with purple cushions and cup holders. The hummus they brought making the whole room smell of garlic. The chocolate Ensure placed shyly beside the bed. The organic lemons they brought to squeeze into his water, the way they  toppled out onto the waxed floor when his daughters set their purses down. There is so much beauty in this sickness. In this ageing and dying and tender moments made only more tender by circumstance. Beauty in lemon and daughter and baby’s breath and purple chair and crossed legs and sweet nurse who is flirting or not. Beauty in packaged salads and boiled hospital food he pretends not to like. Beauty in sunburnt noses and tangled hair and sweat and high-heeled sandals loud on the waxed linoleum floor. Beauty in the old man who shared his room, who was told two weeks was hopeful, beauty in the man’s wife who brought chocolate to the hospital each day, who offered it to each nurse or doctor who passed by the open door, beauty in the way she wept loudly in the shared bathroom. Beauty in asbestos and CT scans and parking spots and bluetooth and cashmere sweaters carried in summer to accommodate hospital air conditioning. Beauty in hoping he has been a good father. Beauty in green tea in knit socks in stretchy jeans greying hair corrective lenses psoriasis stinky feet skinny legs hairy nostrils pinned ears soup-stained t-shirt pericardial effusion mole on temple scar on ring finger window to heart. Beauty in lungs, stomach, brain. Beauty in daughters. 

The foot massager adjusts again. The wind is loud outside. Somewhere on a sidewalk below a parent settles their child into a stroller. In the park all the swings are full. Somewhere a teenager smokes weed in a secret field and calls it invention. Everywhere there is dirge. Everywhere there is song. Beauty in this sad song, sad song, sad song. He burns his toast. Beauty in this too. The day moves on. The clouds will come to cool the afternoon or they won’t. The heat will ease or it won’t. His daughters will call or they won’t. There may be baby’s breath. The dirge is beauty. The meaning is beauty. And so another day lulls and he wonders what the sunset might look like from the other apartments in the building.