The Last Inning

Dad sat in the hospital bed, his skin paper-thin and translucent, staring at something beyond the sterile white walls. The man who once coached my Little League team, who taught me how to grip a baseball just right, who could name every player in the 1986 World Series, now needed help swallowing his morning vitamins.

"You remember when we played catch?" I asked, though I knew the answer.

He looked through me, eyes vacant—a hollowed-out shell of the father I'd known. The zombie-like stare of advanced Alzheimer's had been stealing him away piece by piece for three years.

I started running again after his diagnosis. Every morning at 5 AM, pounding the pavement until my lungs burned, trying to outrun the inevitable. It was the only time I could breathe.

"The baseball cards," he whispered suddenly, clarity flickering like a dying flame. "In the shoebox under the bed."

My throat tightened. "Yeah, Dad. I have them."

"Your mother saved them," he said, then the moment passed. His face went slack again.

That night, I found the box. '86 Mets, '88 Dodgers, my childhood pressed into cardboard. A note in Mom's handwriting: *He wanted you to have these. He said you'd understand someday.*

I sat on my apartment floor, thirty-eight years old, finally understanding. He'd been giving me pieces of himself all along—his love of the game, his belief in second chances, his refusal to give up even in the bottom of the ninth.

The next morning, I didn't go running. I brought my glove to the hospital, sat beside his bed, and told him about every player whose card I'd held the night before. Even if he couldn't remember, I needed him to know: I hadn't forgotten who he was before this disease stole him away.

Sometimes love isn't about curing what's broken. Sometimes it's just sitting in the wreckage together, holding onto the moments that made you who you are.