My ‘Vegetable’ Dad Squeezed My Hand and Looked Me in the Eye

Last week, I read Widowish by <a href="https://medium.com/@melissagould-author" rel="noopener">Melissa Gould</a> who is also a writer here on Medium. I highly recommend her touching, shocking and full-of-love memoir. Through circumstances you’ll have to read for yourself, Melissa recounts visiting her young husband in the hospital while he lay in a coma. That’s it, that’s all you get, go buy a copy of her book ;) While reading about her experience, I was transported right back into a hospital room in Kingston, Ontario where for six weeks we visited with my still, silent dad after his car accident. No one can prepare a fourteen-year-old for visits like those. I had so much hope. After a devastating accident that had already taken the lives of three people, one of them my mother (here’s a bit of <a href="https://medium.com/the-memoirist/the-night-my-mom-died-i-laughed-til-it-hurt-902af18a4511" rel="noopener">that story</a>), my father was the only one from the accident who was still alive. Alive technically, but not really living. After our surreal, otherworldly <a href="https://medium.com/the-memoirist/our-car-accident-the-day-after-their-car-accident-dbd2c7614862" rel="noopener">initial visit</a> with him the day after the accident we knew his ICU hospital room would become a familiar place. We just didn’t know for how long. <a href="https://medium.com/the-memoirist/my-vegetable-dad-squeezed-my-hand-and-looked-me-in-the-eye-f01f13bff268">Click Here</a>