Waiting

Twenty-six years ago I sat in a hospital waiting room with my father, my grandmother, my godmother and my siblings waiting to hear the kind of news that, until then, I’d mostly seen on TV.  Dr. Kildare, or Ben Casey would come out and inform the family that the operation went just fine.

Only for us, on that day, it didn’t go fine.  Or maybe it really did.  Maybe if my mother had survived the surgery the quality of her life would have been so poor that it would have been awful.

I will never forget sitting in that room for nearly twenty-four hours waiting.  The words, “waiting room” will never mean quite the same thing to me after that.  First we waited to see what was wrong.  Then we waited for a team of surgeons to be gathered.  And finally we waited to see how the operation would go.

Most of the night I remember just sitting there.  Once I tried to find the chapel only to discover it was under renovation.  I kept hearing my godmother's voice calling my mother’s name, but in truth she never uttered a word, out loud.

The result was so good the first time the nurse came out.  The operation was over, my mother was being taken off the machines.  All was well.

It was the second time she came out that all of us knew something was wrong.  They took us into a tiny little room and told my grandmother that her child's heart would not restart.  They told my father his wife's heart would not restart and they told my godmother her best friend's heart would not restart. I could not believe my mother's heart would never beat again.  Our hearts all stopped in that moment and broke into a million pieces.  It was the singular most difficult moment I have ever lived through.

And on this night of all nights, I think of my mother and who she was and what she was and how short life really is.