My father is dying. He’s in the oncology ward at Toronto’s Wellesley Hospital, cancer eating away at his colon, his rectum — parts of the body people think it’s funny to talk about.

It’s unfair having to see him like this. How am I going to remember him when he’s gone? As I knew him from childhood — a temperamental giant who used to carry me on his shoulders, who used to play catch with me even though I couldn’t throw for beans, who used to tuck me in and kiss me good night, his face like sandpaper against my cheek? I don’t want to remember him like this, shrunken and old, an anorexic mummy with rheumy eyes and varicose face, tubes in his arms, tubes up his nose, drool staining his pillow.

"Dad…"

"Brandon." He coughs twice. Sometimes he coughs more, but it is always an even number. They rack his body in pairs, these coughs, like one-two punches from a wily heavyweight. "Brandon," he says again, as if the coughs have erased the earlier uttering of my name. I wait for the words that always come next. "Long time no see."

It’s a little play we put on. My line is always the same, too. "I’m sorry." But I’m like an actor who’s been in the same part too long. I say it without feeling, without meaning. "I’ve been busy."

He’s been watching TV again. That forty-centimeter Sony mounted high on the hospital wall is a kind of time machine for him. Thanks to Channel Twenty-nine from Buffalo, which specializes in golden oldies, he gets to peek into the past. Sometimes he reaches back a full six decades for an I Love Lucy episode, flawlessly colorized and reprocessed in stereo. This afternoon he is casting back a mere twenty years for a rerun of Roseanne.

Rosie and Dan are standing in the kitchen talking about the latest trouble their daughter Darlene has gotten into. I’m used to the crispness of my flat-panel wall TV; this ancient set has ghosting and blurry edges. I pick up the remote from the table beside the bed. Click, and the Corners and their little neat world collapse into a singularity in the center of the screen. The dot lingers — a faint reminder of the former life, hanging on longer than it should. I turn to my father.