I was walking into the latest James Bond movie, hands and arms full of popcorn and frozen Junior Mints and foamy beer, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I shuffled my snacks to my elbow pit, pulled out the phone and found a text from my aunt, asking if I’d talked to my mom. I looked at the popcorn I’d spilled on my feet. I had talked to my mom a few hours ago. She’d told me that my dad’s surgery had gone okay, that it’d been close but they’d caught the appendicitis before it went septic, that I could relax, for now. I texted back, told my aunt where I was and asked if it was urgent. The three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again. “No,” she said. “Enjoy your movie, call later.”
The latest James Bond movie had been out for over a month. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, so the theater was almost empty. I found a seat, assembled my snacks around me like a moat and stared at my phone. For months—years—I’d been on high alert about my dad, about his Parkinson’s diagnosis, his knee surgery gone sideways, his months-long bout with what was diagnosed as Lewy body dementia but turned out to be side effects from mismatched drugs. I’d driven, three times, in peak COVID, from Portland to Wisconsin and back. I’d thought, way more than three times, that this was it, the beginning of the end, or maybe just the end. I’d thought and thought and thought, but hadn’t been able to feel, not nearly as much as I’d have liked to, because when you’re swallowing that much medicine you eventually stop tasting it. The latest medicine, though, I’d tasted. Dad, because of his astronomical pain tolerance, had spent three days shrugging off a “stomachache,” which turned out to be a burst appendix, which, if he’d waited even a few hours longer, would likely have been fatal. And now he was in the hospital, and was starting to once again hallucinate, though the doctors said this was just the pain meds, probably. I reread my aunt’s text, inspected it for cracks. My mom had said Dad was stable. She’d told me to go take care of myself this afternoon. She’d heard in my voice that I needed to. I put the phone on silent, grabbed a fistful of popcorn, sat back in my seat.
For much of the latest James Bond movie, I struggled to focus. Whenever Daniel Craig wasn’t flirt-fighting with Ana de Armas or struggling to save a dying Jeffrey Wright from a sinking ship or clotheslining moto-riding bad guys in a foggy Scandinavian forest, I found myself thinking of Dad—his kind blue eyes, the way he still dove from the dock into the lake every morning, the way he’d sweetly collapse into you when he hugged you—and of Mom, and the hospital room where they now both sat. A few times, I pulled out my phone, leaned over like I was picking up spilled popcorn, and checked for new texts from my mom, my aunt, my sister. There were no new texts. Everything was fine, I reminded myself. Dad was stable. This popcorn wasn’t going to eat itself.
As the movie continued, I mostly managed to ignore that acid feeling in my gut—or maybe I just buried it in beer and sugar—and near the end of the film, as the action and tension spiked, for several minutes I forgot that I had a dad, a mom, a body. In the closing moments, though, it became clear that James Bond, who had so many times over so many years come so close to dying, was going to die. Often, at the end of a movie, I’ll tear up, exactly when the studio executives want me to, but as James Bond prepared to die, I did not simply tear up. I sobbed. I shook. I heaved. I laughed, too, aware of how preposterous it was that I could only access my feelings about my father’s mortality via a spy movie, and I kept crying and laughing until the credits had rolled and the theater had emptied.
The sky, by now, had gone dark. The cold air tasted better than anything I’d eaten in the theater. I pulled out my phone, swallowed back the snot and called my mom, who asked me how the movie was and how I was and then told me that she was glad I’d called, she had something to tell me. I sat on a park bench and listened as my mom said that there were complications, maybe big ones. She wasn’t sure how big. All she knew was that Dad had some sort of intestinal blockage and also maybe pneumonia, and he was going to be in the hospital for longer, maybe a lot longer. She didn’t say—didn’t have to—that most people with Parkinson’s die of pneumonia, which they often contract in hospitals.
I told her I loved her and loved Dad and that I’d call again when I got home, and then I got on my bike and I rode into the night and resumed sobbing and shaking and heaving. I cursed myself for going to and crying through a stupid action movie about the death of a hunky spy while my own father was at that very moment maybe dying, and I thought about being a little boy going sledding with Daddy and dancing to Stray Cats with Daddy and four-wheeling in the gray Ford with Daddy, and then I said it aloud, said, “Daddy,” which only made me cry harder, so hard I could barely see the road. I kept going, though, kept riding and crying and murmuring until I pulled into the driveway of my home and pulled my phone from my pocket once more and placed calls until someone answered.
Four days later, Dad went home from the hospital. He hadn’t had pneumonia, just a pulmonary embolism, which, though it initially sounded like a death sentence, turned out to be a relatively minor concern. His intestinal blockage cleared up. His hallucinations subsided within a week. Within a few months, he was all better, except for the Parkinson’s, and the knee, and the steady drip of time.
A few months after that, on another visit back home, I asked Dad if he’d ever seen the latest James Bond movie. He hadn’t, but he wanted to. We went down to the basement and got cozy on the couch. I thought about telling him when, and how, I’d seen this film the first time, but I didn’t want to make him think any more than he already did about how his health impacted the people he loved. So I grabbed a fistful of popcorn, dimmed the lights, and sat back in my seat. As the movie played, I found that I was both watching it and watching myself, back in the theater. A scene would trigger a sense memory, and I’d get that acid feeling in my gut, and I’d glance at Dad to make sure he was still there. He fell asleep in the middle, missed my favorite scenes, but he was awake for the last hour. When the movie ended, I swiveled toward him and asked what he thought. He shrugged, looked at me, then the screen, then me again. “It was pretty good,” he said. “But I didn’t love the ending.”
Brian Benson is the author of GOING SOMEWHERE and co-author, with Richard Brown, of THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at the Attic Institute. His essays have been published or are forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus, Harpur Palate, Bending Genres, and Sweet, among several other journals. He can be found on Twitter at @MrBrianBenson and on Instagram at @misterbrianbenson, and his website is www.brianbensonwrites.com.