​My Dad

When I was six my dad starved to death. He thought he was made of sand and he didn’t move. He just lay there and cried and talked to me and my mom and the doctors put a tube in his stomach but he still died. I don’t know why he thought he was made of sand but I think it had something to do with his mother, who when she was young tried to throw herself and her baby, my uncle, off a bridge because her husband, my grandfather, cheated on her with a student he thought was going to marry him. A neighbor stopped my grandmother and took the baby from her and she went to a hospital for people who might kill themselves, and the baby was given to her husband, who raised it on his own now, because his student didn’t want to marry him after all. My grandmother got out of the hospital eventually but died before I was born, and her husband died when my dad was fifteen because he had a bad heart, and the baby died when it was thirty because a car hit the car it was driving, and my dad died when I was six because he starved to death because he thought he was made of sand. I don’t know what happened to the student but I did learn when I was older that she was sixteen, even though my dad’s relatives always said she was in college. I learned this from my mother, who is still alive, and who hates everyone on my dad’s side of the family except my dad. She might hate my dad, actually, now that he let himself die and ripped the tube from his stomach and said sand can’t eat, sand can’t eat, and I have to stop crying or I’ll turn to mud. I don’t know how my dad’s grandmother died, but I’ve heard everyone on my dad’s side of the family make jokes about how crazy she was and how she almost killed her baby and we’re lucky she didn’t burn down the whole house with everyone inside and herself, too. Anyway, I first knew my dad thought he was made of sand because he dropped a glass of water on the floor and when I asked if he was okay he looked at his hand and said, Sam, I’m made of sand. Now my dad is dead and my mom is alive and I’m forty two and I have my own baby and my own wife, and at night I hold them in my arms and I look down at the hairs on my bare flesh and I pray that God won’t turn me into sand too, or that if He does, I’ll at least have the sense to not rip the tube out of my stomach.