The Party

This is the story of our new beginning for my mother and I, the incident which took us into our current mother/daughter era. This essay was named one of the top 100 in the 2004 Writer's Digest competition, of approximately 10,000 submitted that year:

Friday night was like a party, an outlandish reunion of many different families in a single room, united by dire tragedy. Some brought children; others brought food. People smiled and hugged while waiting their turn to see their sick loved one.
The weekdays and nights were lonely in the ICU waiting room. Only one or two people of a family sat in quiet reflection while the rest of their kin took a break to go home to rest and bathe or to go back to work.
During the day, the regulars played cards in doubles or solitaire, knitted or read. Younger visitors worked on laptop computers, chatted on cell phones or watched television.
Night brought complete tranquility, except for the code blues that sent doctors into the room to awaken family members. They struggled up from their curled embryonic positions in chairs and were ushered into the diminutive waiting room across the hall. After the chaplain arrived, they would emerge sobbing.
But Friday night was different. Instead of somber reflection, it was a happy time, even for the families of the sickest patients.
My two sisters, Linda and Janet, and their husbands were part of our unit, as was my oldest nephew and his wife, who sped down from South Dakota the day before. His brother and girlfriend also joined us.
Helpless to do anything for our mother and grandmother who had suffered a severe heart attack on Wednesday, we indulged in a party platter of hot chicken wings, fried potatoes and mozzarella sticks from a nearby restaurant and traded memories.
“Steve was chasing the dog and came around the corner and slipped on the wet grass she had just watered and landed right at her feet,” my oldest sister said, recalling the first time her husband met our mother.
Mom was obviously not impressed. “Are you sure this is the right guy for you?” Linda said our mother later asked her.
We all laughed, thinking about Steve’s over 200 pound, six-foot frame landing at the foot of our 95-pound mother and offering his hand saying, “Nice to meet you.”
We found the humor in my mother’s belief she could will any illness away. I recounted the conversation I had with my mother on Wednesday night after her heart attack. “Mom, you told me you were feeling good when I talked to you this morning.”
I knew by then that the dull pain of her heart attack had already begun that morning before I called her. “Well, I wanted to feel good,” she said.
I looked up and saw one of the Johnson’s smiling at my story. We became familiar with Mrs. Johnson, a woman in her 60’s, her two sons and one of their girlfriends. The elder Mr. Johnson had survived bypass surgery the day before.
For those of us in the ICU waiting room, our identity was our patient’s surname.
When one of the two outside lines would ring and someone would answer, the person answering would call out whoever’s family they were trying to locate.
As was the case for a different family since we took residence at this place two days before, we watched the Johnson’s wait throughout a grueling 10-hour day. Once, towards evening, when I came back from spending time in my mother’s room, Janet leaned toward me when I sat down, “They just told them that he was in recovery, but he started bleeding, so they took him back in and opened him back up,” she said, nodding toward the Johnson’s.
I was glad that my mother’s own internal bleeding stopped the night before. Two hours later, when they brought him down to ICU, Mrs. Johnson hugged both of her sons good night. She turned, nodded and smiled to us as she walked out to settle into her husband’s room. The worry lines on her forehead had softened.
Most families’ presence was temporary, such as the family who came in that Friday morning. They too, were sweating out a surgery. This family also had two grown men waiting for word about their father. During the day, a hospital volunteer sat at a desk answering the waiting room telephone and taking messages for family members.
It wasn’t long before the two brothers learned that the volunteer was very meticulous about “her” waiting room. Certain lamps had to be on, the coffee pot full and the television at a certain volume. One of the brothers started turning out one lamp every time the volunteer left the room.
By noon, the antics escalated to elevating the television volume up or muting the sound and rearranging the volunteer’s pens on her desk. We all giggled like rebellious children playing a trick on the teacher as we watched her pace around while returning order to all of the items.
“You’re going to make that poor woman have a breakdown,” Janet said to one of the brothers as he turned off the lamp for the last time that afternoon.
“Now, who keeps turning off this lamp?” the volunteer nearly screamed when she returned. Her face red and her hands shaking, she said she was glad it was time to go home as she put on her coat and left, stopping only to turn the lamp back on as she went out the door. We howled with laughter after her departure. At the volunteers’ expense, we were eager for some comic relief.
When their father came out of surgery, they stayed for the Friday night waiting room festivities and then followed their loved one to another unit. “Movin’ on up?” we would ask the families, as patients on the first floor ICU were moved to the second floor rehab unit.
Other families settled in for the long term, either beginning the long journey to recovery or facing sad endings. Anna was the caregiver for a mentally disabled man who had open-heart surgery the day before my mother arrived. We immediately recognized his unique German last name. He was the relative of a neighbor in a community where we grew up.
We followed his progress for four days through Anna. She announced when he first sat up on the edge of his bed and when he shed the respirator. She heard about our mother’s first bites to eat and when the stint from her groin was removed on Friday, allowing her to once again sit up and bend her legs.
Anna was the one who warned us about the hospital food. “The soup is ok, but I wouldn’t try anything else,” she said. After a trial of one of the hospital meals during a snowstorm, whomever’s turn it was to go home had to bring back food for everyone else.
That Friday morning, an older man shuffled into the waiting room using a cane. His face was drawn and he barely looked up as he made it to a chair to rest. I wondered if his exhaustion was mental, physical or both.
I felt the pain on his face. Before dawn, a young woman and her husband were whisked to the tiny waiting room. Her father had passed. My fears for my mother clashed with the flashes of the walls closing in on me in a similar waiting room when my father died of a heart attack nearly 23 years before.
The old man looked familiar to me and I placed him somewhere in the memory of my youth.
“Excuse, me,” I said. “Did you teach high school?” I asked the man as I moved to sit next to him. His face brightened. “Yes,” he said.
“Mr. Martin.” We said his name at the same time.
“I’ve been coming here everyday for the past 29 days now,” he said slowly, looking down at his liver spotted hands. “My wife is being transferred to a long term care facility tomorrow. Flu. I got it and then she did. I was able to shake it, but we don’t think she’ll pull through.”
He gave her room number and I realized she was the woman in the ICU room next to my mother. Mrs. Martin was on a respirator and appeared to be comatose.
I wondered how anyone could handle the stress of coming to this place for 29 days straight. How many nights had he stayed waiting for his wife to wake?
My mind took me back to sophomore biology. Mr. Martin was never a cool teacher. He always moved a bit slow and seemed an easy target. His demeanor must have made us think he was slow witted as well. But he was smarter than we all realized, even once leaving a bogus test key to see who would try to cheat.
I suddenly wanted to go back in time, for Mr. and Mrs. Martin, for my mother and father and for myself. But like a long summer day at an amusement park, we try to do as much as we can until the day is spent. We have the memories of the ups and downs, but we can never get the day back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’ll pray she recovers.” Mr. Martin nodded, smiled and gathered his strength to stand. A sudden blast of music from the intercom interrupted my thoughts as I watched Mr. Martin move slowly and deliberately down the hallway.
“Do you know why they keep playing Rock A Bye Baby?” I asked one of the Johnson brother’s girlfriends.
“They do it every time a baby is born,” she said. The thought of a new life made me smile.
On Saturday morning, Anna’s charge was gone. I did a mental victory dance as I realized he had moved on up. My happiness for them subsided when I saw that a cleaning lady mopping the floor was the only person remaining in Mrs. Martin’s room. She had moved on to the nursing home. As I turned to walk down the hall, the lullaby once again played over the intercom.
Later that weekend, my mother moved on up. Several days into the week, I ran into a frantic Mrs. Johnson as I got off the elevator. “They called a code blue on my husband and I just rushed back up here…I don’t know what happened, he was doing so well.”
She grabbed my hand and I waited with her until the doctor could explain Mr. Johnson’s condition and escort her to her husband. She hugged me and hurried down the hallway disappearing back into ICU.
The next evening, I poked my head into the ICU waiting room. Among the sea of new and unfamiliar faces, who quickly turned away when they realized I was not anyone they knew or anyone who could bring them good news, I saw Mr. Johnson’s eldest son. He smiled and waved.
“How is your dad?” I asked, sitting beside him, feeling almost like an intruder in the waiting room that just the week before I felt we belonged.
“Stable,” he replied. “And your mom?”
I suddenly felt guilty because she was doing so well. “She’s leaving in the morning,” I said, pointing to a bag I brought to pack her things.
Instead of a look of envy, the junior Johnson said, “Oh, that’s great. My family and I pray for her full recovery.”
I realized I had sat in the same chair Mr. Martin was sitting in when I spoke with him the week before. I knew the junior Johnson was sincere in his wishes for my mother.
“And my family all pray for your dad as well,” I said. I felt the genuine warmth of friendship as we shook hands. We didn’t even know each other’s first names, but our lives connected through our shared pain and distress.
As I left the ICU waiting room for the last time, I heard, “And that’s how me and your granddad met…” the group surrounding an older woman laughed.
It was another reunion on another Friday night.