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The Missouri Review

Nonfiction | February 11, 2020

Amends

Patricia Foster

“There’s someone in the bathroom at night who tries to stop me from getting in,” my father insists a few weeks before his death “I don’t see him, but I know he’s there.”
          I nod as if this invisible predator is real, doing his dirty work in the dark. I never challenge my father’s delusion, just as I never challenge the certainty that with advanced, untreatable pancreatic cancer, he will soon die. Though my father’s been a family physician in Alabama for almost fifty years and for the last three months has dressed in a suit and tie and sat for two hours at his desk, he’s never once mentioned that he has cancer. “This problem,” he calls it. “When I get over this problem.”
         I nod at this, too.

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