Thoughts in a waiting room

Eleven days ago, I was sitting in a large wooden armchair enjoying the sound of water burbling over the artifical rocks in the four-story atrium of St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, waiting for my son, Matt, to get out of surgery. When my friend, Amy, heard that I was escorting Matt, she asked, “Are you OK with this, or will it give you flashbacks from the time you spent in hospitals with David?

I was surprised by her question. I hadn’t consciously connected the two. But, hadn’t I? When Matt offered to take a 6:30 a.m. Uber to St. Vincent, so I could do the hour drive to Worcester a few hours later, I knew I wanted to be with him from the start. That’s what moms do.

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior, she describes her Chinese grandmother going to the airport hours before a plane carrying her relatives would land, sitting, waiting, willing the plane to cross the Pacific from China to Los Angeles. Trusting in the power of concentration and attention.

I love that image, though I didn’t expect my presence to change any outcome, (the surgery went well, by the way), but I knew I wanted to be there. The father of a friend of Matt’s, years ago, stopped breathing during a minor surgery. His friend’s mother was at the hospital, alone, so I went and sat with her in the ICU waiting room. She recounted an amusing incident: when he woke up in the ICU, he asked how it went. "You stopped breathing," she told him, and his eyes widened in wonder. Five minutes later he asked, “How did it go?” She told him again: his eyes widened. Over and over this scenario played out, until his short-term memory returned.

Waiting for Matt, the memory of that day came into my mind. I was glad to be there.

I pondered Amy’s question; as I did, I was grateful Matt wasn’t at Walter Reed or Mass General. That might bring back ghosts. The restroom at St. Vincent uses the same automatic paper towel dispenser, from Georgia Pacific, as Mass General. How many times I washed and dried my hands, waiting for the results of David’s lab work, or for his blood transfusions to be completed. For fifteen months, I kept my Mondays and Thursdays open, never knowing how long the appointments would last, or if the day would end with an overnight stay.

All of that is fading into the past. It was so much of our lives, as we lived through it, and as treatments failed, and David lost weight, weakened, and died. Next month will be three years, it feels recent and in the distant past at the same time.