I close my eyes and think of a boy picking up a pencil. 

With the boy’s lightly freckled cheek resting on one hand, the other gripped a pencil with the concentration of a neurosurgeon holding a scalpel. Fine furrows lined his pale forehead, partially hidden by dishevelled ebon hair that covered his ears and glanced across his eyebrows. 

I had wanted to draw my father, not as a man but as I imagined he must have looked as a child; thin but not skinny, well-built with a toughened body not from sport but adventure and hard knocks. Heroic jaw, jet-black hair and keen, dark eyes. A body of purpose and determination, eyes that penetrated; an indomitable character.

There were none of the deep fissures that now carve his face into valleys and troughs, no grey stubble sprouting from tired and weather-beaten skin. Once dark as onyx, his hair is now ashen waves pouring onto the pallid pillow. “You’ve looked better old man!”

I think of that drawing now, and the proud gleam that lit up my father’s normally dusky eyes as he hung it in his office. “Is that you?”

“No,” I lied. “Just someone random.” I never told him how much I had wanted to be that boy in the picture, and not the frightened scrawny kid holding the pencil, and how I had longed for my father’s toughness.

I reach down and touch his gaunt hand, skin like Egyptian papyrus, the clinical odour of hospital disinfectant drawing me back to medical school. I recall those years at university, and how I started to notice the old man’s robust countenance, the sharp gaze that had projected indefatigable determination, had become tainted with flashes of obstinacy. His casual affability amongst colleagues and friends belied a bigotry and misogyny that had probably always been there. I still wanted to be you, though.

Decades passed with infrequent visits, each one revealing wrinkles that deepened with mistrust, his bulbous nose becoming oddly more prominent. Rheumy eyes lost the glint of kindness that had once shone from under tufted eyebrows and oozed perfunctory attentiveness as he evolved into a confusion of stubbornness and dementia. 

“Sorry I’ve not visited for a while,” I whisper as if, despite the empty room, saying it out loud would broadcast my failure as a son. I have given little thought to him in the last few years. 

The drawing, on the other hand, lives in my mind’s eye, proudly on display like the Mona Lisa. I’d never become that heroic boy, and I’d spent forty years becoming somebody very different. Weakness had infected my life, and I now wish for some of my father’s courage. 

I open my eyes and contemplate the old man’s features one last time. His eyes are closed now, muscles slack, stubbled skin pale and thin. The jaw remains solid, however, and the proud forehead reveals the strength of his youth.

I lean over and kisses his brow, a tear falling onto closed eyelids. 

“Goodbye Dad.”