Round 1. Fight!

He wasn’t my grandfather and to be totally honest I wasn’t even related to him. His son was a good friend of my dad so when I was little my parents would tell me, “We are going to Grampa Cliff and Grandma Inez’s place for dinner tonight.” Despite not being remotely related to Cliffton he would always greet me with a hug that was not proportionally sized to his frail body. However, when he would inform me that, “Brody, you’re getting larger every time I see you!” I could still hear that his voice was diminishing quickly. It wasn’t a shock when he went into cardiac arrest, he was nearing 85 and his failing heart could not keep the rhythm. We waited on those soft, cushioned seats with the armrests that never seemed to be in the proper place for comfort. The clock hung on the wall, crooked, but still serving its purpose. The clock was his heart and with every shift of the second hand I could feel Cliff’s heart beat weakly from two doors down. Why does it happen that when you have to wait in a hospital something always makes you aggravated? Whether it was the sniffling of the common cold or the melting snow that had snuck through the bottom of my shoe and began to pull on my sock, I didn’t know. My dry fingers rubbed against one another like two rigid pieces of cardboard. When the young doctor opened the door we all looked to him for answers, he gave us few. Cliff had survived the first round but, with his age, it wouldn’t be long before we were all in the same place. Only temporary relief had been found but that was enough to sustain us till the next time that Cliffton had a boxing match with death.