Author's Notes

I wrote this the day after my father said those words to me. At the time of the conversation, he was in the recovery room after having a lymph node removed. Shortly thereafter, my father was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Stage 4, Aggressive.

I believe my dad got the wrong impression from something I said to him a few weeks earlier on the night I went to the hospital, the one I wrote about in the previous poem, Silence = Consent. What I didn't talk about in that poem was the conversation that I had with my father after his friends from church and my mother had left.

He talked about his fears of taking blood and what his conscience and his relationship with God would allow him to do. His blood counts were extremely low, due to his body trying to fight the cancer, which at that time he hadn't actually been diagnosed with yet. Taking blood could have raised his blood count. The minister that was there when I first came in his hospital room had told him that taking certain things from blood would be okay in their religion's eyes. But Dad disagreed with their thinking, since Jehovah's Witnesses had always claimed in the past that it was against God's law to take blood, and to him that meant all the components of the blood as well.

I told him that what mattered most was what he thought was the right thing to do. If his conscience told him that it was wrong, then he should follow his conscience no matter what the Elders said. He was the one who had to stand before God and defend the choices that he made in life, not the Elders. I was trying to be encouraging, trying to make him feel better about the decision that he'd already made.

I believe that's where he got those ideas from that he confronted me with in this poem. I think he confused me being supportive with me actually sharing the same religious beliefs. Because I certainly don't share those same beliefs anymore. I haven't in years. But I had no problem being supportive. To me, that was just the loving thing to do. I had no idea that act of kindness would come back and bite me in the ass later on. Honestly though, even if I had known my actions might harm me in the future, I don't believe I would have changed a single thing I said to him.

One of Kodi's sisters suggested that I read the book called The Four Things That Matter Most. It's by a hospice doctor about his experiences with the dying. And there was one concept that I could totally relate to, it really cut me deep. I've changed it to fit my situation, but the idea is... If my need to belong and be a part of my family wasn't so strong, the lack of it would not hurt so much.

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