Intensive Care

By Yolanda M. Joosten

you stay as late as you can, given that you haven’t slept much in a couple of days, but who can sleep in a chair in the ICU when their mother is so close to death, so you listen to the doctor, talk to the nurse and leave them your number in case anything happens, hoping they don’t call you at 3:00 am, but of course, they do, so you drive back on a cold night where you see your breath even in the car and you go inside and up the elevator to the ICU, where you let them know you’re back and they tell you they’ll let you in before they pull the breathing tube out because they want to wake her up, so, you sit in one of the fake leather chairs, your legs sweating, and open the book you brought from the car, which creeps you out because a battle’s taking place on the pages between soldiers and a ghost army—in a place of death, who wants to read about death, so you pick up a magazine with a bright red cover and pictures of Christmas cookies and you remember suddenly that it will be New Year’s Eve in a day or two and didn’t your dad die in December, would your mom die before the end of the month too—you look up at the double doors at the front of the waiting room and your eyes flit to the wall next to them, where the staff taped up dollar store holiday decorations to make it more cheerful and in a tacky sort of way, it is more cheerful, and you think back to that Thanksgiving when your dad let you know that his end was coming, but you were too stupid and self-absorbed to understand and you start going back through all the conversations you’d had with your mother in the last week before her failed beating-heart bypass looking for any clue that she thought her end was near and it’s a big nothing—you can’t remember her saying she felt bad until it happened—the trouble walking down the hall and pain between the shoulders, so you get up and walk around because you’re fried and you need to stay awake and the door opens and the nurse calls your name and you stand up straighter praying you can handle what’s coming as you walk behind the nurse and you clench your hands telling yourself you can do it over and over because really, what choice do you have?

Yolanda Melendez Joosten is a retired assistant DA from Texas who moved to the East Bay near San Francisco six years ago with her family. She enjoys being part of a diverse writing community in the Lamorinda area. She has been published in 101-Words.