Three Days Earlier

My dad collapsed in the kitchen on a Tuesday, which is the kind of detail that sounds unimportant until it's the last normal fact you have about someone.

He'd been diabetic for years, careful about it in the specific over-careful way people get after a scare, and my mom found him on the floor by the fridge, unresponsive, his blood sugar meter still sitting open on the counter like he'd been reaching for it.

I called 911 with my hands shaking so badly I had to try the nine twice. By the time the paramedics got him into the ambulance he still hadn't opened his eyes, and the last thing I remember him looking like, before everything else that happened, was ordinary. Just my dad, asleep, inconvenient timing, going to be fine.

That's the version of him I was still holding onto three days later, standing in a hospital hallway being told something completely different.