There is a room in my house where I wait. It used to be my bedroom and now I hardly recognize it. The old oak chests and bureaus line up in stairsteps across one wall. The queen-size sleigh bed hugs another wall and under the window a hospital bed holds my dearest love–and his feet are hanging out the end. Hospice didn’t bring an extra long bed for my big guy. The room isn’t for sleeping or loving any more. It is for waiting.
Sometimes I wait for his eyes to open. Other times I wait for him to speak. Mostly I wait for him to die. I wait because there is nothing else to do. I read all the literature about living every day until he leaves, but there is no living to be done here. He is too weak to sit up much less enjoy life. He doesn’t remember that he cannot walk until he tries to stand. He hates the rails on that wretched bed. The rails only keep him from falling out but occasionally he throws a leg over the top of one as though he really could just jump up and go on with whatever was happening in his latest dream.
He talks to people I can’t see. He talks in the slurred, barely audible voice that is so unlike his growly baritone that I often think that there is someone else in the house. But no, it is just we two–and we are waiting.
In other houses, in other rooms, other people are waiting too. His sister waits for me to call and say that it is done. His mother waits for me to call and say it really isn’t all that serious–a cold, the flu–he’ll be fine in a day or two. My friends wait for me to call and tell them what to do or say. I cannot tell them because there is nothing to do or say. There is only the waiting–a week or two or three. No one seems to know how long he can live on a beer a week and no one can tell me how I will sleep in this room when the waiting is over.
What will I remember in a month? will it be the long quiet hours alone? will it be the hundred cups of coffee Joyce loveingly brings by? will it be Joe, pouring a beer for a man who hasn’t eaten in a week because the first words he has said all day were, “Joe, where’s my beer?” Will I remember that for every time I whisper “I love you” in his ear he says “I love you too” or sometimes “yes, I know.” Will I remember all the tears that wake me in the night or every change in breath or sigh? Will I remember that I have done my best to keep him comfortable, clean and warm? Or will I second guess myself from now until it is my turn to go? I am waiting to find out. I am waiting for him to need me and for him to leave me and to learn how I will live a life with him a part of history. I think my heart is a waiting room.
