Life is Full of Variables with a Constant Outcome There’s an unusual sense of powerlessness in the knowledge that death is inevitable. You can sit there as a twenty-one-yearold and feel the freedom of your own youth and your body’s full range of motion, but in time, as the years progress without your consent, it slowly leaks out of you like a broken faucet. Ryan was twenty-four, and this would be the second time he would see someone dying. The first time was five years ago when his Nana was in the hospital with pneumonia. Most of that day he had forgotten or blocked out, except the potent smell of the hospital—latex and cleaner—and the sound of her wrestling against her own body as she tried to breathe. This time it was his Pop-Pop. Unlike his Nana, he had not been sick for a long time, or struggled with his health. He had not been placed in a nursing home, nor was family alerted to say their final goodbyes. He was a man of few words and even fewer complaints. Ex-Navy, he was tough and quiet—a good soldier. Ryan’s father looked the most like him out of all four brothers, but his personality, rough and hostile, couldn’t have been more different.
These Fish Bite •
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