Could of Said Goodbye

It was only a few weeks after my mother died, when my father and I packed everything that would fit in the bed of his pick-up and moved from MA to AZ, with my half brother and his family. I was ten and this was an exciting new start, with a new school, and new kids who didn’t treat me like I was contagious or something. The plan was for us all to get a place together at first and then for my father and I to get our own place. But if your life is anything like mine nothing goes as planned. We all moved in to this three bedroom trailer, in an area I’ll nicely call crappy.
Then my father got sick, and they admitted him to the hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to see him. My father was in the hospital about a month, before they moved him to a specialty hospital in Tuscan, where I could finally go visit him, but it was a two hour drive. I got to visit him twice in three months, which was ok with me, my mother died at home and watching her suffer still haunts me till this day.
The day my father died started out the same as any other day, I got up and dragged myself to school. The difference started when halfway through the day my brother’s step-son and I where both called to the office for dismissal. We all sat in silence for the two hour drive to the hospital, when we finally got there we where asked to wait in the waiting room, but my brother ignored the nurse and went to my father’s room. The doctor came and called my sister-in-law into the hall. When she came back she was crying, gave me a big hug and mumbled something about how sorry she was, and left to go find my brother. We found my brother outside sitting at a table sobbing like a baby and repeating “If we only got here an hour earlier I could of said good bye”. Seeing my brother crying made everything seem real, and him seem a lot more human.
I didn’t go see my father that day, in fact I didn’t see him again until the wake. I wore the same dress I wore to my mothers funeral, and sat facing the wall the whole time. Two of my half sisters came out for his wake with there families. My brother had my father cremated so there was no funeral, but he was placed in this nice marble box with the footprints poem on it.