Holding On

Seven-and-a-half years into cancer treatments and two months before he died, before we knew he would die, my husband insisted on hooking up the new dishwasher in our old kitchen. No plumber would be paid when he could do it himself. The doing it himself wasn’t the hard part; it was the getting back up. I came home from my nursing work to find my beloved lying on his back on the wooden floor in front of the dishwasher.

I give him my patience: my knowledge and my experience as I put together the puzzle of his complex, nine-month hospital admission in a fifteen-minute acute visit.

I give her my compassion: as I politely but firmly tell her that I am not willing to prescribe chronic opiates for her fibromyalgia and depression.

I am fourteen. I am in a children’s hospital waiting room to see a plastic surgeon. I am here because of a surgical scar on my abdomen that has caused pain while doing sit-ups. This has not prevented my father and me from making a requisite number of jokes about the type of plastic surgery I am to receive.

By the time the blood vessel burst in the back of my dad’s brain, my nine siblings and I had multiplied to a mob of in-laws and twenty-three grandkids. We clogged the waiting room as we paced, switching from seat to seat, talking to one another and making sure our mom was okay.