My name is Robert Mitchell. I’m a Vietnam veteran. Purple Heart. Bronze Star. Thirty-two years as a construction foreman.
Raised three kids by myself after their mother ran off with her boss when they were little. I worked seventy-hour weeks to give them everything. College educations. Wedding payments. Down payments on their houses.
And when the doctor told me I had six months to live, not one of them showed up.
My daughter Stephanie lives twenty minutes away. She’s too busy with her country club friends to visit her dying father.
My son Michael called once, said he’d “try to make it down” but he’s “swamped at work.” My youngest, David, told me hospice care was “too depressing” and he’d “remember me the way I was.”
So I’ve been dying alone in this facility for four months. Nurses checking on me. Chaplain visiting once a week. But no family. No one who loved me. No one who cared that I was leaving this world.
Until last Tuesday when Marcus walked into my room by mistake.
He was looking for his buddy’s father down the hall, got the room numbers mixed up, and found me instead. This huge biker with a gray beard down to his chest, leather vest covered in patches, boots that echoed on the linoleum floor.
