The Final Inning

I learned everything important from baseball. You can't always hit the home run. Sometimes you just need to get on base.

The hospice room smells like oranges and antiseptic. My daughter Sarah sits beside my bed, thirty-four years old and still beautiful, running her thumb over her knuckles the way she did when she was little.

"Remember when you taught me to throw a curveball?" she asks.

I remember. She was twelve, determined, athletic. I told her: snap your wrist like you're breaking something. But not everything. Don't break yourself.

"Your grandfather taught me," I say. His farm, the bull he kept for breeding—massive, unpredictable. One summer that bull broke through the fence. Grandfather didn't reach for a gun or a rope. He walked toward it, slow and steady. The bull charged, then stopped. Grandfather said: some things you can't force. You have to let them come to you.

Baseball was like that. The harder you tried to crush the ball, the more you popped up or grounded out. Great hitters relaxed, waited for their pitch. Took what the game gave them.

"I'm pregnant," Sarah says suddenly. "Due in April."

The orange light of afternoon falls across her face. I've been taking vitamin D supplements for years, trying to delay what's coming. But here we are.

"Your mother would have loved this," I say. "She wanted grandchildren."

Sarah's been running from motherhood for years. Career first, she said. But she's learning what I learned from baseball: you can't control everything. Sometimes you have to wait for your pitch.

"I was scared," she says. "I'm still scared. But Dad—you're going to meet him or her. In a way."

The hospice nurse enters with medication. My daughter, the bull, the baseball lessons, the orange light, the vitamins that couldn't save me—all of it circles back to what Grandfather knew about that bull in the pasture. You don't force things. You let them come to you.

"Name him after my grandfather," I say.

She holds my hand. "I will."

Sometimes you don't need to hit the home run. Sometimes just getting on base is enough.