I hope I was in your last 7 minutes

I wish I could add the video that inspired this poem to my post but all I can do is paste the link here since the insert link function isn't working for me. <blockquote><a class="tc-blue external-link external-link" href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYfO15Iq0G0/?igsh=MWRscXpvdXJiOG1qZQ==" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.instagram.com/reel/DYfO15Iq0G0/?i... </a></blockquote> As usual, play the song before reading They say the brain keeps living after the heart gives up its argument;seven minutes of electricity,seven minutes of something science calls,residual firing,but I refuse to call it anything less than you,still choosing what to hold before you let the dark be permanent. It was 4am.That faithless hour.The hour that belongs to neither yesterday nor tomorrow,the hour God seems to have left with no lights on,no instructions,just the sound of someone breathing and then, the sound of someone not. I want to know what you played in those seven minutes.I need to believe you chose something good.I need to believe,you chose me.Not me standing over a hospital bed with a face I'd practiced to look stronger than I was,but me at twelve,asleep in the passenger seat of your car at even,your hand occasionally tapping the steering wheel, to a song I was too tired to name,the Lagos roads unspooling like a sentence only you knew how to finish. I hope you played that.I hope your synapses,drunk on their last performance,chose the late-night drives.The ones where you talked about everything and nothing,where the city blurred orange through the windshieldand I thought this is what safe feels likeand never said it aloudbecause I was young, stupid and I thought you were permanent. You fought so hard.Two times the sepsis came for you,like a debt collector who doesn't knock,and two times you told your bodynot yet,two times your blood said fire and you said, fine, burn but I'm not leaving. I watched you fight from a body that had become its own kind of cage,saw you win arguments with machines,watched nurses learn the particular geometry of your stubbornness. You were not supposed to be in that bed.You were supposed to be in that car.You were supposed to be calling me at odd hours,about nothing urgent but everything important. The accident stole your movement before death stole the rest and I have never forgiven the particular crueltyof watching someone be taken in installments. I talk to you in empty rooms now.I know you know this.I know because sometimes the silence answers back,in a way that feels too warm to be nothing.I talk to you in the morning,when the light does that thing where it comes through the curtains,sideways and golden. You always woke before the sun,you were suspicious of sleep,as if rest was somethingthat had to be earned. I talk to you while I'm driving because,the passenger seat has not figured out how to be ordinary yet.I keep turning to say somethingand the turning never stops finding you absent.My mouth never stops being surprised by what isn't there.I talk to you out loud sometimes.Full sentences.Are you warm?I kept the playlist you liked.I think I understand now what you were trying to tell methat one time on the drive home when you went quietand I didn't ask why.I understand it now and I'm sorry I didn't ask. <blockquote>I am always sorry I didn't ask. Grief is mostly an archive of questions, you forgot to ask while the asking was still possible.</blockquote> I've decided to believe that heaven received you the way the sea receives rain.Completely, without hesitation or asking what took you so long.I've decided to believe that whatever pain spent those bedridden months,nesting in your chest, your joints,in the particular silence between your shoulder blades.I believe it burned off clean at the threshold. I believe you stood up straight.For the first time in so long,I believe you stood up straight,and whoever was there to greet you,saw you arrive,Barely looking like the man the accident had been slowly editing,but the full, original, unabridged version of my father.I believe your soul finally remembered what it felt likebefore it had a body,before it had pain,before it had a bed that became the worldbecause the world had gotten too small to come to you. I believe you are laughing at something.You were always laughing at,something the rest of us hadn't caught up to yet. Seven minutes.In seven minutes,I have rewound and replayed you so many times.I've worn grooves in the memory.Your voice when you said my name like it was a whole sentence,your hands that were never idle, the way you made silence feellike a form of company,the stubbornness I inheritedand the tenderness I am still learning to claim as mine. In seven minutesI hope you saw the drives.I hope you saw the mornings.I hope you saw every ordinary Tuesday we took for grantedthe way you take for granted a house you've always lived inuntil the day you left it and realized,you never once looked up at the ceiling and thought,how beautiful, how impossibly mine. <blockquote>I hope in those seven minutes, you were not afraid.</blockquote> I hope the fear that must have lived in youthrough those long bedridden nights;the 3am fear,the fear that comes when the ICU is quietand the body is loud.I hope it dissolved like salt in warm water. I hope 4am, that faithless hour,that hour that belongs to nobody.I hope it gave you back to everywhere. I am still here, learning how to carry you.It is slower work than I expected.Some days I carry you easy,you ride in something I say,something I cook,some stubbornness I refuse to apologize for.Some days the weight is biblical. Sometimes, I sit with a cup of tea gone cold,forgetting for twenty minutes that you are gone,and then I remember.The remembering doing what it always does,arriving without warning,leaving without cleaning up after itself. But I carry you.I carry you in every room.I carry you on every drive.I carry you into every morning you never got to see,and I try.I am trying to see it twice:once for me, once for you. Go and be happy, old man.Be happy in a way the body never let you.Be happy past 4am.Be happy through every hour without machines,without pain,without the long work of surviving.Your soul was too large for what those last months tried to make of it.I always knew this,even when I didn't have the words for it,even when I was just a boy in a car at even,pretending to be asleep so you would keep drivingand I could keep being near you without having to explainwhy I didn't want to go home yet. I didn't want to go home yet.I still don't. But I hope,God! I hope,that in your last seven minutes,you found me there, in that car,the good dark,in the simple, holy, unremarkable fact of usgoing somewhere together. Rest now, Dad.You've earned the rest.The rest of us will catch up. — written for him at 4am obviously

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