How to pronounce "catharsis"

Every weekend for as long as I can remember,

my father would get up on a Saturday,

put on a worn sweatshirt

and he'd scrape away

at the squeaky old wheel of a house that we lived in.

I wouldn't even call it restoration;

it was a ritual, catharsis.

He would spend all year scraping paint with this old heat gun

and a spackle knife,

and then he would repaint where he scraped,

only to begin again the following year.

Scraping and re-scraping, painting and repainting:

the work of an old house is never meant to be done.

The day my father turned 52, I got a phone call.

My mother was on the line

to tell me that doctors had found a lump in his stomach --

terminal cancer, she told me,

and he had been given only three weeks to live.

I immediately moved home to Poughkeepsie, New York,

to sit with my father on death watch,

not knowing what the next days would bring us.