The two ghosts entered the room slowly, as if through a thick curtain. 

They were my mother and my father, holding each other’s hands. They saw the boxes I had stacked, the books pulled from shelves, the clothes marked for Goodwill, the calcified coffeemaker, and large black plastic bags of trash sitting around like lumpy little trolls.

I had been taking a rest from the hard work of sifting through their lives. 

My mother’s ghost smelled of curry leaves. A sharp, pungent smell; a hint of bitter. 

My father’s ghost had a spring in his step, like a child entering the gates of Disneyland.

What in the hell were they doing here, I wondered? Hadn’t they gone to dust, as they always believed they would? None of that reincarnation stuff for them. I did not think lifelong professed atheists should now turn up as ghosts. 

“What do you want?” I asked them. “Why are you bothering me now?”

My father recited a favorite poem in Kannada, his native tongue, about an old man whose hair has gone gray, who walks with a stick, whose teeth have fallen out, but he still has passion! It sounded like marbles rolling in a glass tumbler.

He was wearing Gandhi’s handspun dhoti, all wrapped in white cotton as if he was a holy man. It looked pretty funny on him. My mother had a perfectly centered dot on her forehead. A dot-head, she used to joke. And she wore the old nine-yard sari wrapped between her legs culotte style as if she had stepped out of old Maharashtra. 

“We are afraid we left something behind. Can you help us find?”

What did they think they had left behind? Keys? The Limoges china so they could keep up entertaining on the other side?

I sunk deep into the sofa. I was clearing out their house. Putting to trash what they had not seen fit to dispose of. There were New York Review of Books from three decades ago, Linguistic Inquiry, Scientific American, Physics Today. French language tapes from their decades-long efforts to learn a language that must have felt like thorns on their tongue. 

In all this mess, there was something they still wanted?

Why hadn’t they slunk away gracefully into the oblivion of eternal memory? Were they trying to find a way to continue my service to them? Did they believe I should not be liberated from them—they had suffered the dying, but I should not enjoy living? 

“Look,” my father said, pointing to the boxes sprouting with their food-stained clothes, from when they could not get a fork to their mouths without morsels dropping into their laps.

“She is trying to throw us away,” my mother said. 

I pointed to the empty sofa across from me. “Sit,” I said. 

My father guided my slow-moving mother to take a seat. Such a sweet man now! The devoted husband. When he had been alive it was all work, work, work, but now they sank into their old places, two little stones settling in the bed of the river. 

Hot humid summer invaded the room. My father wiped his brow with a large cotton handkerchief.

I knew perfectly well what they wanted, because their ninety plus years on earth had not been enough. There were more books to write, more plays to be seen, more music to be appreciated, more delicious food to be savored. 

“Heat is nice,” my mother said. “It is too cold there. Nicer here.”

“Isn’t it time for a cocktail?” my father asked. 

I looked to the clock. A little on the early side. 

“You should wait,” I said. “It’s only five-thirty.” I liked the feeling of being bossy.

My mother looked to my father and said, “She has always been like this. Do you remember when she took the car keys away?”

 “Let it go now.” My father put a hand on my mother’s hand, as if to quiet her. 

Why had I invited them to sit? I should have gotten the broom and swept them out the door, as I had done once with a sparrow who flew into the house. 

I would get them their drinks and then see them off. What difference did it make anyhow, the time of day? Where they were, there was no time, right? Once they had their gin, they would become more amenable. 

My father patted the sofa beside him, moving away from my mother, leaving a space for me. “Come sit here next to us. Why are you sitting so far away?”

I eyed the spot in between them—just enough for my small body.

“Come,” my mother said. 

She put a sweet smile on her face. All her teeth were back! How had I not noticed? Death had given her a full set. 

“So how is it there?” I asked. 

“There are some interesting people,” my father said.

“Some idiots too,” my mother said, scrunching up her face. 

“I miss you,” I said to her. “You always make me laugh.” 

She shrugged. “If you don’t laugh, you might as well be dead.” 

But you are dead, I thought. 

“You know, I had an idea,” my father said. “I think you will like it.” 

My father seemed so much more alert than he’d been all the months I had taken care of him, those six months after my mother’s death. Maybe, like my mother’s teeth, he had gotten his mind back. There had been times he could not remember who I was. 

“What is your name?” he had asked me as if I was one of the caretakers on duty. 

“I’m your daughter!” I had replied, and only after a few seconds did a light come back on in him accompanied by a short laugh. 

“Silly me.” He slapped his forehead. “I have lost my mind. I am not your father anymore.” 

The man he had been—the hard-working scientist with a slew of physics research papers to his name, university professor, bon vivant with many friends, theater and moviegoer, chamber music season subscriber, French club member, nature lover—how had that man disappeared before my very eyes? It had been painful those months of witnessing his mind devolve into an abyss of worry about bowel movements, the sense that everything that was happening had already happened, a constant déjà vu, and anxiety about his evening gin. He had been watching too, watching his mind dissolve even as he tried to grab hold of it. 

Now, after all that, he had an idea. I was curious. “Yes? What is it?”

“Aren’t you lonely here without us?” he asked. 

My mother looked around the house. The open plan to the kitchen. The atrium-like living room with the upstairs loft. The objects collected from their world travels. The Indian folk paintings on the walls I had yet to take down. 

“You must be lonely here. What kind of life will you have, all by yourself?”

I eyed again the space between them. It was true, I was lonely. But loneliness did not bother me too much. I had been lonely when I had been married, and I wondered if my mother had been lonely in her marriage to my father. I had never asked her. Was it possible now to have conversations that I couldn’t have when they were living?

My father cleared his throat. “Maybe you want to come with us?” 

At first, I didn’t understand. Go with them? Where? What could he mean? But I could see the invitation in his eyes. To go to the land of the dead. Was he crying? 

And then a memory came to me. I had made him cry once. I had yelled at him for pulling on his catheter that had been inserted by the hospice nurse, to ease all the trips to the bathroom, the endless trips to the bathroom, each trip putting him at risk of falling, each fall potentially spelling disaster, a trip to the hospital, worse yet, a permanent stay in a nursing home. No, keep him home, keep him safe. I had yelled at him, and he had looked at me with such hurt. His own daughter yelling at him. Treating him as if he was a child. He lifted the tube that connected to the bag that collected his urine. What is this? he asked, over and over again.

The remorse I felt stabbed me. I had been mean. Had lost my patience. Had wished them dead. I had not seen the point—my mother with her dementia, repeating, Have we eaten lunch?  Her need for constant help. Why are you still alive, I had screamed in my own head. Still, I had held my mother’s hand on every trip to the bathroom, had slathered lotion on her after her shower, had run a comb through the fine white wisps of her hair. May God bless you with eight sons, my mother was fond of saying as if she was in old India where the greatest blessing for a woman was to birth sons. 

Was it necessary to relive all these details? Why not just move on to the land of the living? To the books, and movies, and all the streaming options? To the friends and dinner parties? To weaving a life from what was available? I wondered if once the house was sold, and the mementos sifted through and chosen—would the path be easier to find?

I felt the space between them calling me, the perfect little den between their bodies, where a cozy love lived such as might never be found again. I had to admit the world had become gray without them. Even as I was clearing them away, erasing traces of their long lives, I had the feeling of disappearing myself. I had the feeling of a terrible injustice. I wanted, in fact, to redo each of their deaths. I had lived under the illusion of a good death. A grand death! Peaceful and loving. Hands held, and whispers of love. Tender goodbyes. How it should have gone down. How it didn’t go down. And now here they were, and I had my chance.

“Would you like to do your dying over again?” I asked. “Maybe I can help you with that,” I said.

“No,” my mother said. Again, the bitter pungent odor of the curry leaves. 

“But you died without telling me,” my father said, turning to look at his wife. 

“How was I to know?” my mother said. “You think I could take you away from your important work? Where were you anyway? You went to the department as if they had any use for an old man like you. Making a fool of yourself.” 

“Yes, Mom, why didn’t you tell us, so I could be there with you? Why didn’t you wait until I got here? I was just forty-eight hours away. I had booked a ticket home.” 

My mother looked at me. She looked at my father. 

“You don’t choose these things,” she said. “You don’t choose when you are born, and you don’t choose when you die.”

You don’t choose when you are born, and you don’t choose when you die. I repeated her words. There was comfort in them.

“What about you, Dad? Do you want to do your dying over again?” 

“Did I die?” my father said, with a small chuckle. Then he became serious. “Tell me what happened. I don’t understand what happened.” 

I took a deep breath. I thought he should know. It seemed only fair. 

“It happened quickly,” I said. “Your catheter bag started filling with blood. The hospice nurse said it was irritated from you pulling on it. That soon the urine would flow. But the urine didn’t flow. Ejo arrived for her night shift. Do you remember her? From Ghana? She always took you upstairs and got you ready for bed.”

“Yes, I remember her,” my father said. “She liked to call me Boss.” 

I smiled because it made me happy that he remembered her. She had worked the night shift for three months. Some of the nights had been very difficult. My father would get agitated and demand to be taken home, as if he did not believe he was in his own home, with his books, and artwork, and view of the beautiful maples and black locust trees. Sometimes Ejo had to wake me up because she could not get him to calm down. Once he told me he was on the ninth floor of a building and a man was deciding where people should go. He said he was just asking to be sent home, but some were going to be sent to be punished, and others to be shot! I felt he had somehow entered the place where the dead go. Could that be possible? 

“Then what happened?” my father asked.

“Ejo took you upstairs, but she called for me after twenty minutes. When I came, you were shaking very badly. She had gotten you into your pajamas and into bed. We knew something was wrong. I called hospice again and they said a nurse would come to the house. I held you in my arms, your head in my lap. Your teeth were chattering so hard. And you called out Mom’s name.” 

“He called for me?” my mother said. 

“Yes,” I told her.

“What could I do? I was dead.” 

I continued. It felt good to be telling this story. 

“Finally, the nurse arrived. She saw the bag of blood and called the attending doctor who said to call 911 and have you brought into the hospital. You wanted to go to the hospital. You asked to go to the hospital.” 

“So, you took me?”

“No. The EMTs arrived. You looked relieved to see them. I had to run around getting your social security number and your pink DNR form and your driver’s license and after I did all that and they filled in all the information on their iPad, they told me that no hospitals were taking patients because of Covid. They said they could drive you around and maybe a hospital would take you if you were already in the ambulance. They said if it were their father they would keep him at home and keep him comfortable, but they said it was up to me. We stood around looking at you. You were looking at us with such pleading. In my mind I imagined you in some random hospital lying on a gurney, shivering and cold and unattended for hours. It was not a hard decision. I told them I would keep you at home, and then they left.

“So, they left me to die?”

“No one said you were dying.”

“So, then what happened?” my father asked. 

“The nurse asked me to go get the morphine which we had in the emergency box that we got when we signed you up for hospice. She showed me how to administer it to you because I would have to do it after she left. It was really very easy. Just stick the syringe in the bottle and draw down a half milliliter. Squirt it in your mouth. I asked about antibiotics. She said all the twenty-four-hour pharmacies had shut down because of Covid. So, I thought, okay in the morning we’ll get you antibiotics.” 

Later, I wondered if maybe the EMTs knew. Maybe the hospice nurse knew. Maybe my father and I were the only ones who did not know. He had been dying for months, but now he was dying for real. I thought this later, but in that moment I felt both calm and like a chicken running around with its head cut off. Was it possible to be both? Like the ocean with its calm surface with hidden riptides waiting to drag you under. In the moment, I didn’t believe he was dying. I had waited a long time for this moment, and when it came, I denied it; I wouldn’t let myself go there. 

My father looked impatient for me to continue.

“Then Ejo and the nurse—they flushed out your catheter line—and threw away the bag that was half filled with your blood—and I was holding you and you were still shaking and you said what is happening, and you said, I didn’t do anything bad to anyone—and that broke my heart to hear you say that—because it was as if you thought you were being punished—and I said—no, no you didn’t do anything bad—you are the best person—everybody loves you—which was true—and finally your body kind of melted into stillness.”  

“That is a very poetic description,” my mother said. “You are a good writer.”

I wasn’t trying to make his death poetic. I wanted to make it anything but poetic.

“I have no memory,” my father said. He looked troubled. 

My mother touched his hand. “What difference does it make now? What is the use of remembering? We cannot go back and change anything. Why fret about it if today be sweet?”

But I could not help remembering. I remembered the nurse finished up her duties. It was one in the morning by then. She administered another dose of morphine before she left. And I remembered looking down at my father and seeing that his eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, but they weren’t there, but looked as someone in a coma might look. And I turned to Ejo who had been with many dying people and asked her if this was it, was he going? And Ejo nodded. But then she said, maybe not. I lay down on the bed next to my father and held his hand in mine while Ejo sat in the wheelchair next to him, and I fell asleep next to my father and at four in the morning woke to administer another dose of morphine, following the nurse’s instructions, and my father’s eyes were closed but he was breathing, and at seven-thirty in the morning Ejo gathered her things and I hugged her and thanked her, and I was alone with my father. All of a sudden, he threw up a small jet of brown liquid. It was so sudden and quick. I knew then.

My mother got up from the sofa and walked over to where some of the boxes were stacked. She sifted through some of the stuff. She lifted a winter jacket out of one of the open boxes.

“Look, she is throwing away this good coat. It still fits me so nicely.” She had put the coat on.  

The coat did look good on her. I remembered she had bought it in Paris. It was navy blue and tailored for her petite body. She always had a good sense of style. 

“You were there with me?” my father asked. He was not distracted by my mother.

“Yes. The whole time.” 

“You are so nice. I didn’t know you liked me so much.” 

“Like you? I loved you!”

“I died then?”

“Yes. You were gone by that afternoon.”

It was hard to see him looking so sad. I had done everything everyone says to do—I had held his body and whispered in his ear and told him I loved him. The hospice nurse had told me he could hear me, even on the morphine. I had told him how loved he was. I had told him he would be reunited with his beloved wife. But I could not keep him alive, and because that was what he really wanted, I had failed him.

“Come let us go,” he said formally to my mother. He stood up slowly. 

My mother was still going through the boxes. My father went to her and took her by the elbow.

 “Come. Nothing here for us.” 

My mother dropped a book back into the box. She looked over at me.

“Hold my hand,” she said. “I am not feeling steady.”

I took her hand. It was soft and tiny in mine, just as it always had been. She had shrunk so much in her later years, though she was never not a short person.

She held me firmly though she had no need to fear falling now. 

My father walked towards the door. I followed him, holding my mother’s hand. She walked very slowly as if we were walking on a gangplank. What would happen when we got to the edge? 

“Wait, don’t you want to have a drink? I don’t want you to leave yet. There’s more to tell you. Don’t you want to know?” 

My father did not look at me. My mother followed him, wearing the coat from Paris. They moved slowly, but deliberately.

We got to the door and my father opened it. The sun had left a trail of pink and orange as it dipped into the other hemisphere. My mother let go of my hand and took hold of my father’s. I followed behind them. 

But I had forgotten that the earth was not flat. I had forgotten that it was a giant rock with magnetic poles and that it spun on an axis and that while spinning, it also orbited. So, the gangplank did not actually end, it just curved and hugged the earth, and in that way we all kept walking on it together, and though the distance between us grew, eventually the stars would come out and we would all, all of us, disappear together into the darkness.