10.

I remember waking up 10 years ago this morning.  I was curled up on a recliner that I had pulled next to the hospital bed so we could at least hold hands while we slept.  He had been asleep for days, only rarely opening his eyes, even more rarely aware of all that was going on around him.  But this morning was different. He was further away somehow.  It made me uncomfortable…even beyond my already un-showered, undernourished, dehydrated discomfort, but I had a numbness that had protected me over the last few weeks.  I remember thinking how amazing brains are, that they protect us so well when we need them to. But this discomfort pushed me away.  I spent less time in the room that day than I had any of the days prior.  I would check in, sit near him for a few minutes, kiss his forehead, and leave again.  Something just wasn’t “right”…in an environment where absolutely nothing was right. 

We had created a little camp on the 9th floor of the Lunder Building at Mass General Hospital.  I had originally hoped to take him home. When I learned that this option was impossible, we redirected our hopes to Kaplan House, a hospice on the North Shore that we had been told would help make his last days as comfortable and “home-like” as possible. But he declined faster than we had ever expected. Suddenly it went from “2-3 months” to “1 month” to “weeks” to “days” to “he won’t make it through the weekend, and it’ll be faster if we try to move him”. So Lunder 9 became our hospice.  The staff allowed us to commandeer a lounge directly next to his room. They let us sleep on couches, on chairs, the floor. They let us welcome dozens of friends who came to say goodbye. 

We lived on Lunder 9 for two weeks, to the point where a strange “normalcy” had developed (Again, brains being amazing).  It was to the point where, believe it or not, I wasn’t considering what was coming after. Like we would just be in that limbo forever, between here and whatever comes next. So that morning, when that shift happened, I knew I was supposed to be thinking “This is it. Today’s the day.” But that numbness in my brain did what it did so well and wouldn’t let me believe what was happening right in front of me. Instead I sat in the lounge, drinking coffee, reading a book, laughing with his brother and his best friend and my best friend, going back into the room every hour or so and the discomfort and disconnectedness pushing me out again after 10 or 15 minutes.  

That night around 8 p.m., his brother and I went out for a walk. The air in the hospital was stale and smelled of sickness and bleach and Cal-Stat, a thick, ubiquitous hand sanitizer.  After a few minutes, my phone buzzed. My best friend was calling.  Suddenly the numbness started to melt around my brain. Her voice was quiet and serious.  “You guys should come back up here.” His brother and I ran. We stood in the elevator, the slowest ride of my life, and ran back down the hall towards the room. His uncle came out and closed the door as we ran towards it. I looked at him and said “is he gone?” He nodded.  I immediately hit the floor.  I don’t remember how I made it from the floor in the hall to the floor in his room, but the next thing I remember I was on my hands and knees at the foot of his hospital bed. The numbness was gone. I could feel everything.  I looked up at his face. It had gone completely slack. His skin was pale and waxy. He really wasn’t there anymore.  How that was possible, I couldn’t make myself understand.  I’ve since heard people say “grief is love with nowhere to go”, and all the love I felt in every cell of my body was seeking and clawing…and had nowhere to go.  I felt like I was turned inside out – everything exposed, raw, excruciating. 

The night turns into flashes in my mind after that…us standing around his body holding hands, my mother and stepmother walking in after driving from Gloucester in superhuman record time. Calling his ex-wife and hearing her call their children to come to her, hearing the desperation and sadness and fear in her voice and wishing I could be in so many places at once. Then holding his minister and sobbing on his shoulder, screaming that I didn’t “want them to take him downstairs,” so terrified at the idea of his body being taken somewhere I couldn’t go.  His brother handing me his glasses, and reminding me about Yoko Ono keeping John Lennon’s glasses.  My best friend telling me that we would get a hotel room that night, that we didn’t need to go back to the apartment that he and I shared.  The apartment where his shoes still sat in the front hall.  Then sitting in my winter coat on an ottoman in the hotel room for what felt like hours, staring into space.  My best friend getting me into a bathtub with a glass of wine.  I slunk down into the bath and I stared up at the bathroom light and it was like it was a million miles away.  My numbness had come fully back online, more so than it ever had.  I was somewhere else, curled up and safe from a world where he didn’t exist.  I thanked my brain for doing what I needed so desperately in that moment, for keeping me safe.  I knew this wasn’t forever, that the pain would wash through me again soon enough, but in that moment, I was nowhere. I felt nothing. And I was so thankful.

My life is unrecognizable now from that moment when I woke up in that recliner on Lunder 9 ten years ago, a life where he doesn’t exist in body.  While he exists in my memories, in the memories of those who love him, in photos, in dreams, his absence from my life evolves every year, as I evolve. I’m 40 now. I’m married. I’m a mother of a kindergartener. I own a home. I run meetings and manage people, I’m on committees and working groups. I go to therapy. But I’m continually learning to manage the ebb and flow of the numbness and my vulnerability. I’ll be driving and hear a song, or absentmindedly check the ever-complicated Facebook “Memories” feature, and time is suddenly a made-up construct. I’m at once back in the recliner, or holding his hand at Fenway Park, or singing “Falling Slowly”, harmonizing with him while he drives, or his laugh just echoes in my head so vividly it’s almost like he’s here. But he’s not. And I am. And I can feel everything. And then my brain does the magic that it does, and keeps me safe.

I woke up this morning to my 5-year-old son pressing his little body up to my side, snuggling up as close as he could and saying “Mumma, can we make snow angels today?”

The world spins madly on.