When words just won't do.

I have never before, in my adult life, experienced the deconstructing rhythm of a hospital ventilator as it becomes reassurance of both the grasp on someone in the immediate sense and the inevitability of their eventual loss. I have experienced the death of those close to me and/or those I am close to, but in both major instances, one a murder and the other a suicide, there was never a time to prepare for or except that this person you care for, whether directly or vicariously, would no longer be as well as the helplessness of the situation’s inexorable nature.

However, yesterday I spent eight hours in a hospital as a friend with whom I have been as close as anyone for more than two-thirds of my life watched his mother slowly, yet assuredly, expire. I must admit that from the time I received his call on Monday telling me that his mother were being admitted to the emergency room to the call I received from him at around noon yesterday telling me the prognosis were surgery with little chance of recovery or even life through the following day, I held the situation a little too lightly, but when I heard one of the best friends I have ever known tell me that, if the doctors were correct, he had just experienced the last conversation he would ever have with his mother, it jarred me.

There is the obvious helplessness felt when someone close to you goes through a loss of this magnitude, but this disrupted my basic sensibilities in a way that I did not see coming because for eight hours on a Tuesday my friend sat with his dead mother whose heart simply had not yet ceased beating, and having so much time to process things the thought I could not escape was that he will grieve her death but will eventually find his grief replaced by a subtle longing for her to be nothing more than…available. And this crushed me. Six months, three years, he will not be able to pick up the phone and call the woman who, if nothing else, birthed him and tell her that he loves her. His wedding day, the birth of his first child, her perpetual absence will be inescapable. This brought me to the realization that, we all expect things from our loved ones and these expectations are very often not met by them, but the one aspect of truly loving and caring for someone that should never be failed nor overlooked is our availability to them which happens to be the one aspect most often failed and most often overlooked. I know I fail my loved ones, and they fail me.

So after having this reality rhythmically beat into my heart by the pumping, humming, and buzzing of this woman’s fading life right before me and worn on my friend’s face, I have to resolve to learn and grow from his plight.

So, I called my mom on the way into the office today just to tell her that I love her and could not remember the last time I had done so.

Zeius