I am sitting on my fire escape at 2:14 am staring at the trash bags piled up on the curb three floors down and I am so incredibly angry that my chest feels like it’s being crushed by a hydraulic press. I just got off the phone with my grandmother who was whispering in the pantry so he wouldn't hear her and she told me he spent four hours today mowing the back three acres in ninety-seven degree heat even though his ankles are so swollen they look like rising bread dough spilling over the tops of his New Balance sneakers. It is the same story every single summer—the humidity hits a certain percentage and he starts gasping for air like a landed fish but if you even mention the word cardiologist he acts like you’re trying to put him in a home and strip away his dignity. He keeps saying it’s just the heat and that everyone gets a little puffy when the dew point is this high but I know he’s lying to himself and it makes me want to break something. Is it weird that I’m more mad at him for being stubborn than I am scared that he’s going to drop dead? Does everyone feel this constant buzzing resentment when the people they love are being objectively moronic? I’m out here in the city paying three thousand dollars a month for a studio that smells like diesel fumes and working sixty hours a week just to keep my head above water in a career that feels like a long-form performance piece and I have to spend my limited mental energy worrying about a man who won't take a damn pill. My grandmother said she literally begged him—she was on her knees in the kitchen while he was drinking lukewarm Gatorade—and he just looked at her and said the lawn wasn't going to trim itself. The lawn. A patch of green grass that literally does not matter in the grand scheme of human existence is apparently worth more than the integrity of his mitral valve. I can hear the sirens going off down on 7th Avenue and I’m just thinking about how one of those could be for him any minute now because he thinks he’s built out of iron instead of seventy-four-year-old tissue and bone. I remember when I was twelve he told me that a man’s worth is tied to the maintenance of his property and I guess he really meant it because he’s willing to sacrifice his heart for a clean edge along the driveway. I’ve seen those ankles... they’re purple. They have these deep indentations from his socks that stay there for hours and he just rubs them and says he needs to eat less salt. It’s such a blatant, disgusting LIE. He knows his heart is failing and he’s just choosing to let it happen while my grandmother loses her mind with anxiety. She’s counting his respirations while he sleeps—thirty-two breaths per minute, she told me that exact number—and he just wakes up and complains that the mower is pulling to the left. Why do men of that generation think that suffering in silence is a virtue? It’s not a virtue, it’s a burden he’s dumping on everyone else because we’re the ones who are going to have to find him slumped over the steering wheel of that Toro. I had this meeting today with my supervisor where I had to pretend I cared about the Q3 projections and all I could think about was the specific sound of the oxygen concentrator my neighbor uses and wondering if that’s the soundtrack to my Christmas this year. I’m so TIRED of the performance of being a "successful young professional" when my family is falling apart in a suburb three states away because of some misplaced sense of agrarian pride. I told him on the phone last week that if he didn't go to the doctor I wouldn't come home for Thanksgiving and he just laughed and said I was being dramatic. Am I being dramatic? Or is he being a narcissist? He’s always been the pillar of the family but now the pillar is crumbling and he’s yelling at us for noticing the dust. I keep thinking about the exact moment the heat stroke will hit him or the fluid will finally fill his lungs to the point of no return and I wonder if he’ll feel regret then or if he’ll just be thinking about the weeds in the flower bed. It’s 2:38 am now and the humidity here is starting to feel like a wet blanket and I’m just pacing this tiny metal grate wondering why I even bother trying to build a life when the people who gave it to me are so reckless with their own. He’s got this one specific hat, a faded green John Deere cap with a sweat-stained brim, and I can see it so clearly in my head—him wiping his forehead and leaning against the fence while his heart tries to beat through his ribs. I hate that hat. I hate that lawn. I hate that he’s making me mourn him while he’s still standing there. There’s no way this ends well and I’m just waiting for the 4 am phone call that changes everything while he sits in his recliner tonight with his feet up thinking he’s won some kind of battle against the weather. It’s not the heat, Grandpa. It’s your body giving up and you’re too proud to admit you aren't the same man you were in 1985. I want to go down there and scream until my throat is raw but I know he’d just look at me with that calm, infuriating smile and tell me to go back to the city and mind my own business. Is this what it’s like? You just watch the people you love kill themselves over a few thousand square feet of fescue? I’m so angry I could throw my phone off this ledge and just disappear into the dark because at least then I wouldn't have to wait for the news.