On his deathbed in a hospice outside the town where I grew up, Dad took my hand and told me that when he was a child in the next county over, he saved the life of a colossal freshwater crab in our local river. As a token of that creature’s gratitude, he received a single wish, which I needed to know about now since it would affect his quickly approaching end of life. Most boys, he said, would have been short-sighted, wishing for money or a girl to like them, or to be the top boy at pickup basketball. Dad, pragmatic even then, thought ahead to this moment, to its stress and sadness.

“This crab could talk, Dad?” I asked him, and he nodded.

He told the crab how every night he would open his bedroom window and gaze up at the stars. If he could have anything in the world, it would be a powerful telescope—though a telescope wasn’t his wish. Dipping his fingers into the brown river water (he was crouched on the bank, speaking low to the crab, face to face), he likened what lay below, known to the crab but not my father, to the heavenly firmament. Two worlds that were mysterious to humankind.

And he wished that, on the precipice of his death, he might escape his body and travel to the outer reaches of all there was to see, impervious to cold and heat and unbreathable gases, no longer a conscious passenger in a body bound to Earth, but, rather, a visitor of planets and stars and clusters of asteroids and spatial voids until such time as his curiosity was sated, and only then, in that moment of fullness, would he cease to be.

He named a good number of the specific bodies and regions he had a mind to explore, alphas-this and nebulize-that, but those names were meaningless to me, and they fluttered by uncaptured. I had always known Dad to be a space nut—a trait I didn’t think of as childish when he was younger, but which I did now that he was an old man, as if the proper thing would be for him to set aside his scientific credulity and replace it, as so many do, with a newfound attraction to Jesus. Appraising the lumps of his withered body under his hospice bedsheets, I sometimes imagined him under a child’s duvet of ringed planets and shooting stars, how he might pant with delight to receive such a gift.

“What happens to your body, Dad, when your mind is zipping around up there?”

A boyish smile played across his lips when he told me that he didn’t know. Perhaps it would disappear from his bed and be confused for a miracle. Maybe there would be no perceptible change, his body going on as it was now, mumbling and sputtering and already so unlike himself that he hardly needed to be present to steward those duties.

I misunderstood, patting the top of his hand as I withdrew my own, changing the topic of conversation to an uneaten fruit cup on his tray.

That night, a nurse called.

A coma.

Some on the hospice staff seemed inspired by his unwavering smile, touching their crucifix necklaces and attributing it to Godly peace. His eyes, beneath taped-down lids, darted around the room as if its dim corners were showing him wonders. For this, they had no Holy explanation.  

There’s been no change for years now. I still visit him. More often since I retired last fall. I don’t speak to him because I know he isn’t there to hear me; I just sit beside him and quietly read, occasionally wiping at the dampness in the corners of his grinning mouth, wondering what he sees.

Lately, with an ache in my back and knees from sitting, I’ve begun to imagine my own body in a bed like his, a newly purchased Bible at my bedside. There was no fairytale crab in the river on any of the occasions I went looking for it, at least none which came to greet me on the surface of that opaque water. I feel lonely, left behind—Hansel and Gretel’s father after he stranded them in the woods, Alice’s mother during her daughter’s time down the rabbit hole, a nameless villager who never climbed a beanstalk. A side character with no tale of his own, because I have no tale worth telling.

I return to my book now, turn a page. I’ll be fine, I tell myself. There’s a savior whom I’ll learn to love before my ending comes, the same as anyone.

My thing will be as good as Dad’s. Faster, too, when it’s my time, and I’m shepherded to Glory. I’ll be fine. I will. Surely.