Loss
“NO!” I gasped, the words wrenching their way out of me. They were like ice, dripping off my lips and shattering on the dirty white linoleum at my feet. “That can’t be. You’re- you’re wrong! My son is NOT dead!” I sank into the hard, plastic chair, the ridges on the back digging into my spine.
“I’m-I’m...um… sorry for your-uh-loss.” He grabbed my hand, his felt soft and warm. I yanked my hand away. This man failed to save my child, my baby. How dare he pretend to comfort me with his words. Sorry? That’s what my son says, said, when he breaks, broke, my bedside lamp by running around. How can that same word encompass this broken feeling in my chest? I can’t hold hands with this man. His hands are soft from failure and sorrow, they are warm with pity and grief.
My shoulders curled forward, my face buried into my arms. “He-He can’t be just gone.” Through the folds of my arm, I could see my feet. I wore black flats that I threw on when the paramedics insisted I put on shoes. I dragged them across the floor, leaving a black trail.
“Is there anyone I can call to help you? Bring you-um-home? Or a nurse?” The doctor stood up, brushing off his white coat, rumpled and dirty on his skinny frame.
“I want to see him.” The doctor hesitates, glancing around like a frightened animal. “NOW!” It sounds so harsh, but surely, after all this, I deserve anger. I am 33 years old and I have held everyone I loved while they died, saw the light go out, felt the fight fade in my arms. Vindictive anger is the only emotion I can draw on that won’t kill me.
“Yeah…” His words dangle in the word as he struggles to think of a way of out what i want. He wants to protect me, but I am beyond that, I am no child. ”Yeah, okay. Nurse!” A small nurse with perfect makeup on fine smile and frown lines fanning off her eyes and lips. She smiles at me with sparkling teeth, while her soft, brown eyes examined my curdled form and stricken face. “Hey-uh-take her to the room, where-um-he is.”
“Sure thing, darling.” She smacks gum in her teeth, and outstretches a callused hand that she peels a rubber glove off. “Hey, stay with me.” The doctor leaves, squirming in his jacket.
I listen to the click of her heels, creating a rhythm that I follow all the way to the room at the end of the hall. The nurse goes first, shooing a curious doctor out of the way before guiding me in.
There he is. My boy, my son, my child, the light of my life. Swaddled like the baby he has shrunk to in a sea of white sheets tossed up around him. All the beeping machines are powered off, the noise that I hated with everything is all I want to hear again, those beeps that set the pace. Everything is pushed off to the side, like a shrine built to him.
I stagger into the room, crumpling like a dead, autumn leaf by his bedside. I grasp for his hand, his small little hand that still fits so neatly in mine. I start to sob, each cry rising from the pit of my stomach through the long funnels of my lungs before bursting out of my mouth like some alien monster.
The nurse kneels beside me, and just sits, one hand on my back, stroking me like a mother to a child. How twisted, how awful. Through this, I have been stripped of my role as a mother and reverted back to a primitive child, one that can only speak of it’s troubles through screaming and crying.
I hold my child’s hand and squeeze it as tight as I can, wondering if I could still break my boy’s fragile bones in his hands. It seems like hours pass before the nurse somehow procures a cup of coffee and a warm donut before peeling me off the bed and into a chair. “Hey, darling, can you hear me?”
I nod, sinking my face into my coffee cup lid, letting the warmth ebb onto my tear-stained cheeks and steam around my puffy eyes. I’m not hungry or thirsty, but with food and a drink in my hand, I feel compelled.
The nurse stands up, keeping her arm on my shoulder. “I know what you told the doctor, but are-are you sure? I can’t let you drive in this state, you’ll fall to pieces on the road. If not, I can call you Uber.”
I can’t be in a car with a stranger who will just judge me for red cheeks and mute rejection. Which leaves only one option. I take a sip of my coffee before answering, entranced by my scratched polish fingernails. They’re a chipped red revealing flakes of dark skin, softened by the clear nail. “There’s one person. Her number’s on my phone.”
Before I can reach for it, the nurse has whipped it out and is powering it up. I don’t have a password, so it lights right up and chirps a greeting at her. “Her name?”
“Margaret.”
She scrolls through my contacts, her glossy pink nails clacking as she calls up “Margaret”. “Hello, this is-No ma’am, this is not Natalie, it’s a nurse, my name is Ashley. Natalie is here-” She looks away, “Do you wanna talk to her?” I nod, nibbling at my donut. “Natalie’s here, but she cannot speak right now, there’s been,” another sidelong look slung at me, as soft as feather, but still powerful enough to make me flinch, “incident and she needs you to pick her up at Mercy Hospital. Do you need directions? (pause) No, okay. Well, come to the front desk and ask for Ashley.” She hangs up. “She’ll be her in 20 minutes. I have to help some other patients, you stay here, okay?”
I nod, watching her walk away. “Thank you,” I say. I can tell by the way her spine straightens, she heard me. Other patients. Are you still a patient after you die? Or am I the patient she means? No doctor would be able to see my wounds, there’s no chart you can flip open to see what i have seen, to understand what I have felt.
Car accident, four years ago. Both my parents clung to life just long enough for me to make it over there and watch. I pulled my father’s plug from the wall, then clung to it like my child. I held my mother as she went from mountain to valley, sinking so far down that the walls collapsed and buried her.
Lung cancer, last year. I gripped my husband’s hand while he slipped away, for a whole long year, decaying into a zombie of medication. He wheezed out his last words to me then Peter while we clung to him. I thought it would be the longest year of my life, but the one since has only been longer. Maybe they’ll all drag on until I die.
Now this. Falling. I held my son’s hand until the paramedics stole him out of my arms.
I collapsed against his bedside, gulping down coffee until my hands trembled. Being alone in this world, I decided, required lots of warmth to keep away the cold tendrils of society. My hair fell into a thick tangle brushing against my child’s arm. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I failed.”
I sat there for a half hour, trying to keep my mind blank until the nurse came back, this time with Margaret. I stood up, throwing away my empty coffee cup, my eyes dodging Margaret’s gaze. “Thank you, Ashley.”
She gave a tentative smile, walking over to my son’s bed. “All in a day’s job.” Her eyes turned into bruises and shadows that rang of darker promises. She pulled the sheet over my son’s face.
“Hey, uh. I know this is weird, but, care for-care for him, for me, please?” I choked out, my eyes watering.
“Yeah, yeah. He’ll be here, while you figure out what to do, okay sweetheart?” she said, as she strided back over to me and squeezed my hand. She flicked the lights out and closed the door. “Stay strong.”
I turned away, my hands trembling as I followed Margaret out of the hospital. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, but especially not her.
Margaret got in the car first, staring at the wheel until I buckled up, before finally starting the car. We drove in silence for a few minutes until we were on the highway. Then Margaret, still staring at the long road ahead, droned in a deadpan tone, “So… Peter’s dead.”
I felt my shoulders seize and I pressed my face into the window. A beast clawed at me somewhere in my chest, it ripped and tore with ravaging claws. I shook my head, begging her to stop. All I wanted now was to bury my child and let myself go. I couldn’t repeat when my husband died, when I said the same story over and over again until something in me broke.
“I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry. That’s what everyone thinks will help, like I care about their sorrow, their grief. Inside of me, a thermonuclear meltdown is occurring, incinerating my insides, charring everything in sight. I can’t breathe for smoke and ash clinging to my lungs and throat, i can’t think for flames inside my head. Her words hang in the air before the beast burst out, catching them in it’s claws. “No. No! NO! No, you don’t get to be sorry, not anymore!” I turned on Margaret, bubbling with so much pain that I just wanted to share it, wanted to lift it off my shoulders, just for a moment. I wanted someone else to understand what pain meant. “You abandoned him, you abandoned both of us, YOU ABANDONED YOUR SON! Henry was dying, he needed his family! You were SUPPOSED to be his mom, and you left us! You saw me and Peter and Henry stuck in a sinking boat and turned your back when we all needed you more than any other time! You said you would be my mother since I lost mine, and you LEFT! My mother would have never LEFT ME! SHE WOULD NEVER HAVE LEFT PETER! SO YOU DON'T GET TO SAY SORRY!” I sat there, panting hot, fiery breath that scorched the chill left stagnant in the car.
Margaret pulled over and stared at me in shock. “You’re right,” she finally said. “I left. I couldn’t watch my son die. Surely you know how hard that is?”
“No. No, I watched Henry and Peter die, and you’re right, it hurt worse than anything else I’ve ever felt. But I didn’t leave, because I knew, no matter how much I hurt, they hurt worse. So don’t lecture me.” I folded my arms over my chest and leaned forward. “Please, just drive. I want to go home.”
Margaret drove back onto the road. “How can I make that up to you?”
I shook my head. “You can’t. You just can’t.”
Ten minutes passed until she spoke again. I counted, I watched. Then, Margaret broke the silence. “How’d it happen?”
I curled forward like burning paper. How far would I curl before I broke apart into ashes? I didn’t want to say it, I wanted to scream and sob in terror and agony. But all my fight was gone. I couldn’t stomach anything more, so I might as well go for a killing blow, just to end it now. “He was tree climbing, as high as I’d let him. I was watching through the kitchen window, washing dishes when he went to high. I was going to tell him to get down, but I dropped a fork. I bent over and when I looked back up, he was sprawled out on the ground. He didn’t even scream. I’ve never moved so fast. I grabbed my phone and dashed out there, already calling for help. He was just lying there, my baby, and I held his hand.” My body spasmed with a sob. “I told him to stay awake, but he was so confused, so distant. I don’t even know if he saw me. When the paramedics got there, he was unconscious. He started dying in the ambulance and they wouldn’t let me follow him. He would have been so scared if he was awake, and I’m grateful he wasn’t,” I managed to choke out in heavy breathing. The car had stopped again, and Margaret was hugging me. I hated her, but still I clung to her, the only port in a raging storm.
“Oh, Natalie. I’m so sorry. I know you loved that boy.”
I sobbed. “He was only eight! Why, why WHY?”
“Hush, it’s okay. You can answer those questions later. Right now, just feel.”
And I obeyed, letting pent-up grief, loneliness, and fear leftover for four years rush out, like unscrewing a shaken soda bottle lid. It came out like a river, spilling out of the car, onto the road, and down the highway before finding it’s way back to my boy.
