I have my father’s legs. They look a bit like runners’ legs except the rest of our bodies weren’t equipped to run marathons after years of inactivity. Dad would joke about how he’s expecting the next child then continue to his next classic joke while laughing from his disproportionate belly. When Dad got pancreatic cancer in 2006 he lost 30 lbs in one month. His legs held their runner’s shape but he lost 1lb of hair including most of his mustache and his belly was finally proportional to the rest of his body.

I still remember sitting in the hospital room with him, this time because he lost the strength in those legs of his. I hadn’t slept for 30 hrs or so and had eaten little when Dad’s breakfast came. He looked at his meal and I could feel him inwardly wish that he could eat like he used to. He wished for Mom’s chicken glop and tortellini salad that he would have two or three plates full and he’d go on Atkin’s diet a few months later to shed that second or third plateful that had rested so nicely in his belly. That day in the hospital room, all he would be able to stomach was the vanilla pudding that clung to his five or ten hairs he called a mustache and he would give the rest of his meal to me after hearing my stomach grumble again. He had eaten like that for a few months now. He said he had lost his sense of taste.

While I ate my potatoes soaked in today’s mystery oil I looked at my father’s legs. His ankles had swelled and his feet were so swollen that they were the same width as his ankles. His legs blended in with his knees. Chemo and cancer had finally taken all the strength and shape out of my father’s runner’s legs. When I saw his sausage like legs I knew something was wrong, even if the doctors all dismissed it as they had the week before when I first noticed it. “It’s just the cancer.” they’d say. Later I found it was really his body shutting down and depositing its liquids into those runner’s legs I used to compare to my own.

The last time Dad came home, I looked at his legs while oxygen was pumped into his nose. The skin was taut and was the same color as the vanilla pudding that had once clung to his pitiful excuse of a mustache. I looked at my own legs, and how thin and shapely they were compared to his. I wanted give him back his old body but instead I stroked his feet as he laid in his deathbed long after he took his last breath.

When I finally left the room I ran for miles on my own. It would be a long time before I could eat vanilla pudding again.