Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

Decades ago and years younger, my father loved to imitate Tim Conway from the Carol Burnett Show. Do your Tim Conway, we’d say when we were all home for Christmas. Dad would curl his body into the stooped form of an old man and with arms pumping ever so slightly, shuffle from his favorite wing-backed chair to the dinner table. The imitation was impeccable. We laughed ourselves off the sofa. Dad turned eighty the summer Mom died, with the blood pressure and pulse of a man half his age. A few years of lonely and he was old. His back melted into a curve and froze. His skin went pale and dry. He stopped trying to hear. The last time he stepped on the scale he weighed one hundred twenty four pounds, fully clothed, wearing shoes and a jacket. I followed in slow motion as he shuffled down the corridor to the doctor’s office, weak and infinitely tired, white-knuckling the bar of the walker, his head pushed forward to point the way. Is this what happens? Do we finally become the character we once pretended to be?