Crossing the Limen
By Dawn Tasaka Steffler
October 15, 2022
October 15, 2022
Limen, noun. A border between one thing and another. See also, Threshold.
My dad calls and in halting pidgin says he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
I feel concern but it’s hazy and distant, like storm clouds on the horizon. It feels like I’m hearing bad news about someone else’s dad. A thought catches my attention, like a curtain fluttering in a sudden breeze, Well, at least Dad knows how his story will end, and I recoil slightly. Like a good daughter I fly home to Hawaii when he undergoes a Whipple procedure. I want to be a good daughter. But when the anesthesiologist comes in to talk with us post-surgery, I notice her German accent, her bright red clogs.
My sister schedules a weekly call between the three of us and I listen to her arrange pick-up times for walks, he asks if they can go to See’s for more butterscotch candies, they help with his chemo dry mouth. She encourages me to call him on my own but I don’t know what to say to him anymore. I don’t understand how my unionized, blue-collar, Japanese-American dad turned into a pro-life, Trump supporting, Fox News fan. What we would talk about — his pain? his opioid-induced constipation? his adult diapers? — so I push it off. The best phone calls between us were always the spur-of-the-moment ones, I’d call from Safeway, needing a childhood recipe, shoyu ginger pork tofu or Portuguese bean soup. Our best conversations were always about food, something he can’t take pleasure in anymore.
Threshold, noun. The sill of a doorway. The place or point of entering or beginning.
My phone rings, it’s my sister. I can’t pick up because I’m on a zoom call so I let it go to voicemail. A green, text bubble pops up on my screen:
You should think about coming home soon, Dad is going downhill.
A buoyant seasickness washes over me and I have a vision of my dad as a tree limb floating downriver. My sister is behind him, thigh deep, hands outstretched, trying to catch up to him. I am not there. I am trying to be useful somewhere else, being a Dutch boy, fingers in holes, fingers plugging up a crumbling dam.
I fly home and the air is thick and muggy with Kona winds. My sister and I take him for a walk in the afternoon drizzle. We go to his favorite fruit stand in Kaimuki and I watch his loose-skinned, purple veined hands turn a papaya over and over, then bring it to his nose to sniff. He says he wants to eat Taco Bell on the way home. My mom scolds us the next day, saying he threw up for hours.
Hospice delivers a hospital bed. We move him into the room my sister and I shared as kids. When he says he’s having trouble sleeping I vividly recall staring up at that same popcorn ceiling the night Hurricane Iwa hit, listening to wind-propelled rain slam against the tightly closed glass louvers. He has outlived most of his friends. I wonder if their ghosts keep a vigil over him, watching his chest rise and fall, witnessing his temples and cheeks sink in and conform to the skull shape beneath, waiting for him to decide: Enough already.
My sister drives me to the airport to the sound of music and windshield wipers. I see how the Ko’olau mountains are dotted with winter waterfalls again. I catch the flash of them, like long, silvery earrings, hidden within emerald green ridges. When the airplane lifts off the ground, I think: This was it, wasn’t it?
Liminal Space, noun. Transitional spaces like waiting rooms, rest stops, stairwells; somewhere unsettling yet familiar; usually characterized by the absence of people.
I dream about the river again, swollen with rain. The water is now up to my sister’s armpits. I hear a waterfall’s roar.
The day after my dad dies I go to the grocery store and almost hit another car while backing out of the parking lot. Then on the drive home I notice my neighborhood to the point of distraction: strollers on porches, messy garages left open (by accident?), lost pet signs duct-taped to light posts. The edges of everything are extra sharp. I think about something my sister said when she called to say Dad was gone, about how we didn’t ask him what he thought would happen after he died. Did he still think he would be reincarnated? Or did he now believe in Heaven? It felt morbid and too direct at the time, but I wish we had, I wish we knew the answer. Then I would know where to look for him.
My dad calls and in halting pidgin says he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
I feel concern but it’s hazy and distant, like storm clouds on the horizon. It feels like I’m hearing bad news about someone else’s dad. A thought catches my attention, like a curtain fluttering in a sudden breeze, Well, at least Dad knows how his story will end, and I recoil slightly. Like a good daughter I fly home to Hawaii when he undergoes a Whipple procedure. I want to be a good daughter. But when the anesthesiologist comes in to talk with us post-surgery, I notice her German accent, her bright red clogs.
My sister schedules a weekly call between the three of us and I listen to her arrange pick-up times for walks, he asks if they can go to See’s for more butterscotch candies, they help with his chemo dry mouth. She encourages me to call him on my own but I don’t know what to say to him anymore. I don’t understand how my unionized, blue-collar, Japanese-American dad turned into a pro-life, Trump supporting, Fox News fan. What we would talk about — his pain? his opioid-induced constipation? his adult diapers? — so I push it off. The best phone calls between us were always the spur-of-the-moment ones, I’d call from Safeway, needing a childhood recipe, shoyu ginger pork tofu or Portuguese bean soup. Our best conversations were always about food, something he can’t take pleasure in anymore.
Threshold, noun. The sill of a doorway. The place or point of entering or beginning.
My phone rings, it’s my sister. I can’t pick up because I’m on a zoom call so I let it go to voicemail. A green, text bubble pops up on my screen:
You should think about coming home soon, Dad is going downhill.
A buoyant seasickness washes over me and I have a vision of my dad as a tree limb floating downriver. My sister is behind him, thigh deep, hands outstretched, trying to catch up to him. I am not there. I am trying to be useful somewhere else, being a Dutch boy, fingers in holes, fingers plugging up a crumbling dam.
I fly home and the air is thick and muggy with Kona winds. My sister and I take him for a walk in the afternoon drizzle. We go to his favorite fruit stand in Kaimuki and I watch his loose-skinned, purple veined hands turn a papaya over and over, then bring it to his nose to sniff. He says he wants to eat Taco Bell on the way home. My mom scolds us the next day, saying he threw up for hours.
Hospice delivers a hospital bed. We move him into the room my sister and I shared as kids. When he says he’s having trouble sleeping I vividly recall staring up at that same popcorn ceiling the night Hurricane Iwa hit, listening to wind-propelled rain slam against the tightly closed glass louvers. He has outlived most of his friends. I wonder if their ghosts keep a vigil over him, watching his chest rise and fall, witnessing his temples and cheeks sink in and conform to the skull shape beneath, waiting for him to decide: Enough already.
My sister drives me to the airport to the sound of music and windshield wipers. I see how the Ko’olau mountains are dotted with winter waterfalls again. I catch the flash of them, like long, silvery earrings, hidden within emerald green ridges. When the airplane lifts off the ground, I think: This was it, wasn’t it?
Liminal Space, noun. Transitional spaces like waiting rooms, rest stops, stairwells; somewhere unsettling yet familiar; usually characterized by the absence of people.
I dream about the river again, swollen with rain. The water is now up to my sister’s armpits. I hear a waterfall’s roar.
The day after my dad dies I go to the grocery store and almost hit another car while backing out of the parking lot. Then on the drive home I notice my neighborhood to the point of distraction: strollers on porches, messy garages left open (by accident?), lost pet signs duct-taped to light posts. The edges of everything are extra sharp. I think about something my sister said when she called to say Dad was gone, about how we didn’t ask him what he thought would happen after he died. Did he still think he would be reincarnated? Or did he now believe in Heaven? It felt morbid and too direct at the time, but I wish we had, I wish we knew the answer. Then I would know where to look for him.
Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the Bay Area. She is working on a first novel and can be found on Twitter @DawnSteffler.