Isaiah 55:12
"I tell you, if these were silent the very stones would cry out."
Luke 19:40
Ten years ago tonight my mom almost died when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain. My dad was in the shower when it happened; my brother was watching TV in the living room; my mom was ironing my dad's clothes for work the next day; I was driving across Kansas with some friends on my way to a church conference in the Ozarks. My dad gave her CPR--or his hodgepodge version of what he had seen in movies anyway--still dripping from the shower while my brother called 9-1-1. He kept her alive until the paramedics arrived and sped her to the local hospital. After my dad dried off and got dressed he followed with my brother. And I drove on down I70 oblivious.
It is weird to look back on what has proved an epochal day in my life and try to remember it as it was and not as I have made it to be, inflating it over time as it came to be a Day and not just a day. I have snatches of that first night. My brother's first call and the confused nature of what had happened/was happening. The next call that told of the Flight for Life helicopter ferrying my mom to the old University Hospital location on Colorado. For that phone call I was at a truck stop in Salina, Kansas putting gas in my car. I was in my T-shirt because I was tough and I wasn't going to let a little thing like a blizzarded-over central Kansas force me into thicker layers. I remember crumpling towards the ground there, just outside, away from my friends. I remember the impulse to turn around and drive back but being shamefully frozen in place. We slept at my grandparents' church outside of Topeka that night. Or, some slept, I should say. I didn't blink.
The next morning my grandpa and other of our family friends were at the church and prayed for me. I talked with my dad on the phone for the first time. This was the first time I heard the word 'aneurysm'. I had no idea what it meant. But he said he wanted me home. A family friend booked me a ticket back to Denver from the Kansas City airport. We went to my grandparents' home and I took a shower and tried to steel myself for what was to come. My friends drove me to the airport. It was the loneliest and perhaps the worst moment of my life when they pulled away. Having booked the ticket three hours before the flight I suffered the indignity of overzealous TSA scrutiny. A woman sitting next to me on the plane tried to hit on me--the first, so far only, and, giving my aging dadbod I can only assume, last time that has ever happened.
My fiancé--now wife--picked my up the airport and we drove toward the hospital through Denver traffic. What happened next was almost unreal. My mom's inevitable brain surgery, a four hour ordeal to clip off the blood vessel and clean up blood that had accumulated on the brain, had kept getting delayed throughout that day (the 27th now) and when I landed the word was she was about to go in. I thought that there was no way I would make it. But then we did. My dad escorted me through to her room just as they were taking her out for the surgery. She looked so frail, hooked up to machines and sunken under hospital clothes and bedding. But I got to see her. I held her hand and told her that I was there and I wasn't leaving. She squeezed my hand back and I leaned over and kissed her and then she was whisked away. As far as we all knew she might not live through that surgery. Statistically she shouldn't still have been alive anyway. I crumpled into my dad's arms, sobbing for the first time. It was a great gift, though, to see her then. To touch her. To speak to her. I am forever grateful for it.
So much of the drama was to come in the time that followed this first dramatic 24 hours. I don't have time to get into everything here. Plus, I am not sure I remember it right. I don't know what's been added on, embellished, what timelines have collapsed from a sporadic morass into a more cohesive and spatial whole.
There are a few things I can cling to because there are dates tethered to the experience. For example, I know that I went home for the first time on the 28th to watch Kansas State play their bowl game. My dad, uncle, and brother headed back to the hospital after the disappointing performance but my best friend and I stayed at my parents' house. After drinking ample amounts of cheap whiskey--I don't remember the brand, just the price range--we called it a night. After he fell asleep I got back up, unable to slow my mind and rest. A few days before, Colorado had endured an historic snowstorm when a 36" monster bombarded the front range. On the night of the 28th the second storm hit, dumping another 20" on an already stressed infrastructure. I remember this particularly because unable to sleep, and depleted by the recurring lack of sleep, I went outside. I went outside in nothing but my boxer shorts and sat there as the snow fell and the cold quickly numbed my body. I sat there as long as I could bear it before going inside and curling up in a ball on the floor in the same spot where my mom had passed out. The ironing board was still out. I stayed there for a long time.
Here's another that I basically trust but still wonder about. I tried to go back to work one morning--shortly after the new year (and I am skipping over a lot here)--but stumbled around in a haze and decided to go home. A coworker mercifully talked me down from my original plan of just quitting. My grand plan was to cook a big pot of chili for my dad and me to eat. We had subsisted for the past week or so on takeout Thai and burgers and whatever else we could scrabble together or was kindly donated to our perpetual vigil. I went to King Soopers and as I walked into the house I got a call from my dad. I don't remember exactly what he said (sidetone: if anyone should try to recount dialogue when telling a story it's safe to say they're extemporizing; I can't remember verbatim discussions I had earlier this morning), but the gist of it was clear: mom was dying. In what turned out to be simply another in a set of scenes ripped from a Hallmark movie I sped away towards the hospital in my beloved old Nissan Pathfinder, alternately praying fervently and swearing ferociously at drivers with the temerity to slow my progress. I screamed into the parking lot at the hospital (the tires are screeching in my memory), vaguely aware that Sufjan Stevens' version of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" was playing through my iPod and ran towards the neuro unit. In what I can only find darkly comedic now, after dramatically running through the length of the hospital I got to the elevator to get to the floor my mom was on and, patients and visitors being denied stair privileges, I had to wait for an excruciatingly long time for the elevator to arrive. As I waited people I had previously bumped past in my headlong effort for the third floor walked past me. By the time I reached the floor the situation was calmed. I don't remember exactly the resolution or exactly the problem but they had to do an emergency angiogram on my mom and prevent something bad from happening. And they did. And now my mom is fine. She is literally in the 100th percentile for aneurysm recovery. If I remember correctly that was the last major scare.
As fuzzy as those memories are of that time they are nevertheless incomprehensibly dear to me. Because of God's grace and mercy I can look back on them with joy.
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We just got back from Hawaii earlier today. My family and the two (soon to be three) grandchildren my mom might never have met, my brother and his girlfriend, my parents and my grandmother. We went to celebrate Christmas and celebrate the past decade. I cannot imagine the past ten years without my mom. I cannot imagine a world in which my kids don't have their gaga. Life is so normal and so uninterrupted by that event that it is easy for me to be tricked into forgetting what a blessing my mother's mere existence is. Her physical presence defies explanation. Her ability to walk with, talk with, play with, color pictures with, and get into the ocean with my kids is miraculous. Even if her natural timidity prevented the latter activity from getting above knee-high water.
I don't know why things happened this way. I don't know why my mom lived and other people on her unit in that month died from the same thing. I've been asking that question for a decade and I'm no nearer an answer than I was then. But the miracle of my mother's existence and life has reinforced the miraculousness of all life. The blessing of each of her breaths reminds me of the blessing of every breath we unconsciously and ungratefully take. The beauty of watching her play with my children emphasizes the everyday beauty in the movements of my children and the physical suppleness of play. The utter undeservedness of drinking wine with her over a steak dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean admonishes me to drink deeply of the undeserved grace that saturates our entire world.
The lesson, in other words, is gratitude. If my mother's continued presence on this planet is cause for wonder it is really only slightly more wonderful than my presence here. Than yours. What I can cling to even as the memories fade or collapse into each other is the imperative of thankfulness. And I pray that I may cultivate this virtue of gratitude--of praise to God for all of these holy gifts--all my life. For, as Christ says, if you have been given much, much is therefore expected of you. And I have certainly been given much.
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