Mark Lanegan
I'll Take Care of You

"Are you cold?" I ask him as I begin the daily massage with the cold ointment. He whispers a long "nooo": he closes his eyes as if he's about to have multiple orgasms. I smile, it's true, but I want to scream. I press on the calf and distinctly feel his tibia and fibula under my fingertips. Goosebumps. A year and a half earlier, we had gone to the mountains together for hours. Now, without me, his crutch, he can't even go to the bathroom. When things go well, seven times a night. The legs, those mountain running legs he gave me, I took from him, and now I can't believe I have to carry him on my back to climb the stairs. The purest love has the bitter taste of a urinal kept in its place while being filled with amber liquid with difficulty, the smell of dirty underwear due to an exhausted sphincter. A shower with a body full of folds, muscles have relocated elsewhere or have been consumed. "Sorry," he keeps telling me. "I'm ruining your summer." I smile and kiss him on the nape, the hair is gone. I want to tell him to hold on; it's almost over, but I don't want to take away his hope. Never. A pair of brand new multifocal glasses as proof that there is a future. It's nonsense, like talks of the future and plans. But yes, so many drugs in his body make him believe everything, thankfully.

I get up to turn on the stereo, and Mark Lanegan bursts in with this wonderful cover album. His voice is rough, warm, and enveloping. He never had time to listen to music, and so trapped in bed all day, he listens to what the disk jockey offers. "What a beautiful voice," he tells me; the song that is lulling him is "Creeping Coastline of Lights", and with his hand, now a claw, he sways his fingers following the voice and the gentle rhythm. I smile, and this time for real because it's the perfect album to capture this damn ordeal. Sweet and melodic, a terribly sad and heartbreaking lament in the form of notes. Only a few instruments support Lanegan in these just over 35 astonishing quality minutes. His favorite was "Badi-Da", with that light arpeggio that instilled tranquility. But his favorite changed every day, and who could blame him: like shooting fish in a barrel.

It's been six months since the doctor told me it's only a matter of time. I didn't even cry when he told me with the delicacy of an elephant in a china shop. My brother is married and lives abroad; I'm thirty years old, and it's up to me to give strength to my mother and take care of him, sleeping, when the double has only one guest and the head nurse takes pity on your pain, with him in oncology. Quite a nice place, mind you. Proving with facts what is so easy to say when reality is a distant and blurred image. And now that on a late June day, the last thread has been cut with the start of palliative care, we have brought him home, and I'm drowning him with my discography. "I'll Take Care of You" has been our soundtrack for almost every daily massage we've discussed everything. I preferred the more rhythmic and robust "Boogie Boogie" with dirtier interpretation or "Carry Home", capable of always giving me a terrible lump in the throat. He nodded, the head with a forty-five-point drawing resulting from the removal of a ball (not a tennis one), when the lullaby "Shanty Man's Life" played.

I've said screw everything since he entered that damned ward. At four in the morning, he was still breathing, if you can call it that, a metallic and suffering rattle. He's bradycardic, and now, on his last night, his heart races at 110 beats per minute. I clasp my hands, I pull out some of my hair. I realize that yes, I'm at his bedside. I open my eyes; it's 6:21, and he's not breathing anymore. I didn't even notice.

The graphite of four tennis rackets flies everywhere on the porch of the house, and three tubes of balls shoot into the countryside, pushed high by the force of the curses I yell as if I were a black metal singer. The curses he never uttered throughout the illness. Twelve months of deceit to play a necessary part are over, and only after three months can I jot down four crooked sentences to remember him with this dreadful album. Dreadful because every track is a station of a torment I hope you never have to experience. Only an album of absolute value can bind itself to a life so profoundly.

I know you can't hear me, you didn't believe it either, but even if it's not much, I dedicate it to you anyway. Dad!