A pair of pyjama trousers

A pair of pyjama trousers, bought from The Gap three years ago.  

Something has always bothered me about them; they seemed too familiar, but I couldn't say why.  Then last week it came to me: the fabric is almost identical to the nightshirt my father wore on his deathbed.

Beneath it, his skin had shrunk tight to his ribs, the muscles gone who-knows-where; his breastbone - the shield for his heart - was the hardest thing I have ever felt. 

Then finally, the incongruous plumped-swollen pillow resting beneath the chin, a buttress against the slack-jawed smile of death. “I’d forgotten they do that...” said my sister; then the nurse's awkward, compulsive lie over our shoulders: “...he wasn’t alone when he died.” 

It would have been his 75th birthday today. What a stupid thing to say, to even think. There is no ‘would have been’; there is nothing but this.