Part Two: What the Room Became
By my teenage years, it had become clear there wouldn’t actually be any miracle recovery waiting for me. I could sit upright with proper support. Use my chair for a few hours at a stretch. Most of my actual life happened inside that one bedroom.
Gus made that entire room into a whole world for me instead. Shelves built precisely within my own reach. A janky tablet stand he welded together himself out in the garage. For my twenty-first birthday, he built a small planter box beneath my window and filled it carefully with fresh herbs.
“So you can grow that basil you’re always yelling at, watching the cooking shows,” he said.
I burst into tears immediately, overwhelmed.
“Jesus, Elowen,” Gus panicked, misreading my reaction completely. “You actually hate basil?”
“It’s perfect,” I sobbed.
He looked away, embarrassed by the emotion. “Yeah, well. Try not to kill the thing.”
Then Gus started getting genuinely tired. At first, he simply moved slower than usual. He’d sit halfway up the staircase to catch his breath properly. He’d forget his own keys constantly. He burned dinner twice in one single week.
“I’m fine,” he insisted whenever I asked. “Just getting old, kiddo.”
He was fifty-three years old at the time.
Mrs. Sharma finally cornered him out in the driveway one morning. “You go see an actual doctor,” she ordered firmly. “Don’t be stupid about this, Gus.”
Between her constant nagging and my own genuine begging, he finally went. After the full battery of tests came back, he sat at our kitchen table, papers spread flat beneath one trembling hand.
“What did they actually say?” I asked, heart pounding.
He stared past me, unable to meet my eyes directly. “Stage four. It’s everywhere already.”
“How long do you have?” I whispered.
He simply shrugged. “They gave me numbers. I stopped actually listening after a certain point.”
He tried desperately to keep everything exactly the same as before. He still made my eggs every morning, even once his own hand had started shaking badly. He still brushed my hair carefully, though sometimes he had to stop midway and lean heavily against the dresser, breathing hard through the effort.
At night, I’d hear him retching quietly in the bathroom, then running the faucet to cover the sound. Hospice care arrived not long after that. A nurse named Noelle set up a proper hospital bed in our living room. Machines hummed steadily in the background. Medication charts got taped to our refrigerator door.
The night before he actually died, he told absolutely everyone to leave the room.
“Even me?” Noelle asked gently.
“Even you,” he confirmed. “Just for tonight.”
He shuffled slowly into my own bedroom instead and eased himself down into the chair beside my bed. “Hey, kiddo,” he said quietly.
“Hey,” I said back, already crying.
He took my hand in his. “You know you’re the best thing that’s ever actually happened to me, right?”
“That’s kind of a sad thing to say,” I joked weakly through my tears.
He huffed out a small laugh. “Still entirely true, though.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without you,” I whispered.
His own eyes went shiny with emotion. “You’re going to live, Elowen. You hear me? You are going to live your whole life.”
“I’m genuinely scared.”
“I know,” he said softly. “Me too, kiddo.”
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something more important, then simply shook his head instead. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Sorry for what, exactly?”
“For things I genuinely should have told you a long time ago.” He leaned over and kissed my forehead gently. “Get some sleep now, Elowen.”
He died peacefully the following morning.
