I’m Glad My Father Spent His Last Days in the Age of Obama and Not Trump

It would have been appropriate to wear crème colored personal protective equipment while visiting my father at the hospital.

“The PPE will protect you from contracting an infection,” is what the nurse said.

Fuck that.

He was still my father, the man who’d raised and protected me. And I was his only son. I wasn’t about to hug my dad with hands covered in gloves, a mask pulled over the front of my face, and a gown draped over the length of my body. I didn’t want to be disconnected from him in such a way.

I threw the mask and gown over one of the chairs and went to embrace him. He was still handsome, just a few wrinkle lines were embedded in his caramel colored skin. But the cancer had ravaged him until he’d lost about fifty pounds. His clavicles protruded from beneath his skin.

I sat on the beige chair to the right of his hospital bed. Dad reached down to grab the remote control from on top of the sheets and hit the power button. Dad watched the television, riveted.

The talking heads of the MSNBC network were screaming at the television cameras. The government shutdown, spearheaded by the republicans in congress, was barreling towards its second week of existence, and everyone was wondering when…