The Flight

by Ellen Gunnarsdottir

My father knew that March would be a long month this year so he died on the last day of February. Nobody expected it. My mother had said that he would outlive her and become a hundred. He was eighty, recently retired from his medical practice, and still indestructible, or so we thought. We should have paid attention to the sudden liking he took that winter to staying in bed with the cat on his knees, reading one of the books usually strewn around him. In January he got a bad flu, three weeks later it had turned into pneumonia and most of February he spent taking antibiotics and sleeping. We talked a great deal about his new infirmities, but none of us did anything because Karl had always been the one in our family to make medical decisions. And then his heart stopped on that last night in February, leaving us to guiltily explain the enigma of his final days to at least three dozen insistent relatives who all felt they had had a stake in his life and death.

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