Short story time everybody. This one is entitled, "Stick With Me." It's a little sappy, but I hope that some of you can relate to the message.

For the record, my dad died from fulminant hepatic failure of the liver. For the record, this is how the rumors about my father being an alcoholic started. Putting my entire family in a small room together for any amount of time will always result in gossip. Some of them speculated that he had drunk himself to death. Some said that he did from a brain tumor. My aunt was convinced that he had been shot during a liquor store hold-up. They were all wrong.

To be honest, nobody outside of my immediate family knows how he really died. He had worked many years in children’s television and we preferred to keep the details of his death a secret. It wasn’t that we were ashamed that he died from complications of hepatitis B. Granted, when most people think of hepatitis they immediately think “sexually transmitted disease.” My dad got his from a dirty needle at the blood bank.

The reason we were so secretive is because we knew dad would've wanted it that way. He was never big on revealing his private life to anyone, so we figured he would respect the way we handled his death. Although, standing by the food tray, hearing my Uncle Sammy tell me about how my father should have been more careful when handling guns (Sammy believed he had shot himself while showing off for some friends), I wish we had just told everybody. It wasn’t worth this.

For the record, I didn't cry when he died. I just couldn't. I'm not sure why.

After the funeral, I decided to leave town for a while. I just had to get away. I couldn’t bear to see my sisters start to talk about dad, gradually breaking off into muffled sobs again. I couldn’t bear to watch my mother stare out of the window sadly, not saying anything. I think the fact that she never cried either was what bothered me the worse. So I left. I went to the East Coast for a week and just tried to forget everything.

I remember my dad coming home from work one day. He scooped me up in his arms and I told him how I wanted to be a writer. He smiled and told me how that was one of the best jobs in the world because you get to use your imagination all day long. That’s why he loved what he did: The response he got from those children every day, laughing and screaming and clapping their hands… He told me how it made him feel ten years younger. In reality, he looked about twenty years younger than he really was.

But my dad was modest like that sometimes.

Five days into my “vacation” I got a call from our family’s lawyer. He wanted to inform me that the will would be read in two days. I cut my plans short and headed back home. My sisters had improved. There eyes were still puffy and red from crying, but the tears came in shorter intervals. My mom still had that far away look in her eyes. She hadn’t been eating too much and had lost an alarming amount of weight. When I hugged her, it almost seemed like she wasn’t there at all.

One time, when my father was eleven, he fell from a tree and broke his left arm. He told me how that after a few weeks with the arm in the cast, he forgot about it completely. It was as if it just disappeared, was no longer part of him. And after he had gotten the cast off, his arm was all pale and sickly looking, like a body that had just been exhumed from a fresh grave. He always said that since then, his left arm never seemed to cooperate with the rest of his body. Whenever he would go to reach something with his left hand, the arm would jerk and knock the object away instead.

My dad was weird like that sometimes.

The lawyer read the will. I won’t bore you with the details. My sister got a collection of books she always liked. My other sister got some furniture that was in storage for her and her new husband. My mother got control of his entire estate, although she seemed like she could care less about it.

I got a cigar box.

I don’t like to play favorites, but I could always tell that my dad held me to a certain regard above my sisters. Maybe it’s because I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be creative, and my sisters wanted to be business people. Maybe it’s because dad and I trusted each other more than he trusted his daughters to always tell him the truth. When the lawyer handed me the cigar box, I was at a loss for words. It wasn’t big enough to hold furniture, nor was it big enough to hold any books. I wasn't sure what to expect from him. I decided to hold off until I got home to open it.

When my father was seventeen, he was driving around with his friends, just goofing off. They came across a woman standing at a cliff face. She stared out at the water, an empty expression on her face. My father and his friend were convinced she was going to jump. Everybody wanted to go and find a cop, but my dad insisted that it would be too late. He worldlessly got out of the car, walked up to the girl and looked over the cliff. Below he could see the waves from the ocean crashing into jagged rocks at the bottom. He whistled clearly, and the girl turned her head towards him for the first time.

“What do you think the odds are that somebody could survive a fall like that?” my father asked this woman. The woman just shrugged. “Probably not too good,” he said, shaking his head. Then he took her hand.

“Maybe we should just go ahead and try it,” he said to her. She looked back at him with a shocked look on her face. “I mean, if we survive, that’d be an amazing story to share, wouldn’t it? How we beat the odds.”

“What if we died?” the woman asked in a quiet voice.

“Well,” my father replied, exhaling deeply. “That'd be an even more interesting story. It just wouldn't be ours.” Then they jumped.

And that's how my mother and father met.

When I got home, I sat down with the box, staring at it for a second. A ribbon had been tied around the box to keep it from flapping open. I took a deep breath and ripped the ribbon off. I slowly opened the box and found… Popsicle sticks. Hundreds of used popsicle sticks. I could almost hear my dad laughing at me, slapping his knee and going, “Gotcha!” Each stick had a joke printed on it, the kind of jokes that are so corny that you can’t help but roll your eyes. The tiny black print was still clear through the purple and red and orange stains, as if somebody had gone back over them with a pen.

When I was six, my father disappeared for a year. He never told anybody where he went. We had our suspicions, but we couldn’t know for sure. He left one day to get some milk, then came back twelve months later, a carton of two percent in hand. When my mother asked hm where he had been, he just simply stated that he had traveled half-way across the country to find a carton of milk with the latest expiration date on it. My father was really weird like that.

I got a call later that night. My sister, Samantha, explained to me in the calmest voice she could muster that mom was gone. She had gone to the cliff where she had met dad to spread his ashes. She lost her footing and fell. At least, that's what my sister said. The uncertainity in her voice was as clear as day though.

For the record, I couldn't cry when she died either.

I glanced at the popsicle stick I was holdng in my hand. The joke read: "What did the little boy who fell from the ground feel upon impact?" The punchline read: "The ground... very suddenly." A groan escapes my throat and I subconsciously roll my eyes.

It's hard to lose a parent. Losing two in the same month is just unbelievably painful. I hate funerals. I avoid them at all costs, not that I think it's not important to pay your respects to the dead. I just don't handle those sort of situations very well. I'm not very good a grieving. I can't cry. I just clam up, become unresponsive. I'm not a very pleasant person to be around. I'm not saying I'm a bundle of joy to be around in the first place... but still....

I look at another popsicle stick. Another corny joke. Something about fire. I can't remember exactly. It makes me think of the day my father came home covered in soot and reaking of smoke. The news came on that night and there was a story about a mysterious man saving twenty seven people from a burning apartment complex. All my dad did was apologize to mom about ruining his suit. My dad was pretty secretive sometimes.

I can't tell if these memories of him aren't somehow enhanced due to my age at the time. A child idolizes his father. To him, a father is a superhero, a man of great power and intelligence. There's nothing your dad can't do. He's your Superman. He can make any fear or pain go away. All he has to do is pick you up and hold you close to him, and everything goes away. You feel safe again.

I tought about the safety of being in his arms and I realize that I'll never feel that again. And for a brief moment, I started to panic. I don't know if I'll ever feel safe again. My father's gone. My mother's gone. All I've got are these popsicle sticks and a slab of stone I can visit every once in a while to pay my respects. I can't breathe. I stumbled out of the room, clawing at my shirt and collapse to my knees. The first tear wells up in my right eye. I'm momentarily blinded until I blink and the tear slides down the side of my face. I curled up on the floor in ball and just let it out. For the first time, I realize how radically my life will be different now that they're both gone.

For the record, nobody every wants to truly be alone.

I walked back into my room and sat down at the desk. I stared at the cigar box for a moment, then poured out the contents and started spreading them across the desk. Piece by piece I started to arrange them, looking for a pattern. Each popsicle, each joke, brought up a new memory of my father. Each memory brought up a fresh wave of tears. I slowly start to understand. I placed the joke about the tree and the little boy first. I placed a joke about a faithful internal organ ("She may be a pancreas, but I could never liver") at the very end. Then slowly, I started filling in the middle.

"Why did the hippie nearly drown while surfing?" "High tide, man."

"What do you get from a cow in a bad mood caught in an earthquake?" "Sour cream."

The cliff. High tide. The milk.

After an hour straight, I had each stick laid out, seperated by date, signifcance.... I grabbed a notebook and began scribbling down every memory of him that comes back.

For the record, I never took my parents love for granted. I just didn't realize how much it meant to me until they were gone.

My sister got his books. My other sister got his furniture. I got his life story.

He was thoughtful like that sometimes.