Marrying Up to Watch You Fall

The day the oncologist confirmed my father’s cancer was terminal, I found a folded piece of notebook paper tucked beneath his pillow.

It was a bucket list, written in his shaky, fading print. The very first line read: See Mark get married.

I spent the next three weeks meticulously planning a proposal. I wanted it to be beautiful, a quiet promise of a future that would give my father some peace. I asked Sylvia to meet me at the coast, intending to ask her to be my wife.

But I waited. From the pale light of afternoon until the freezing, pitch-black dark of midnight, she never showed up.