#yellowbells

Yellowbells (Fritillaria pudica) are one of our first spring wildflowers in the Absaroka Range, northwestern Wyoming.

https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/fritillaria_pudica.shtml

She spent most of her time taking what she had been given for granted.

She tricked herself into believing that she had somehow earned everything she had, even though she had not worked a day in her life. It was a normal day of her pretentious problems, a normal day of “depression,” or her twisted version of it. The boy I like is dating someone else, she thinks every day. Poor, pitiful me. She knew nothing of loss.

Her mother acts off when she picks her daughter up.

“Something has happened,” her mother says, though she now has forgotten the exact words used. All she hears is white noise, because she loses track of whatever sympathies her mother is rambling off. She just focused on breathing.

Her grandpa, HER Grandpa, has had a heart attack. Airlifted. Hospital. Things don’t look good. These were the only important words, the only ones she heard.

They drove to the hospital, and memories she’d kept under lock and key rose to the surface of her mind. She saw herself, years before, in this same situation. She caught her reflection in the window, but she instead saw a young girl, who was innocent and happy. Who didn’t grasp the concept of death. Who thought cancer was like a cold.

“Is he going to be okay?” She asked, her vision blurred with tears that refused to fall.

Her mom looked straight ahead. “I don’t know, sweetheart. It’s really bad.” Her mother had tears dripping down her face, two hands gripped tight on the steering wheel, knuckles white, as if it were her lifeline.

She arrived at the hospital, greeted by overly friendly nurses and stern doctors. The whole place was sterile, the smell of disinfectant and medicine overwhelmed her nose. Scents that she now associated with death. She hated hospitals.

Her family was already in the waiting area, surrounding the chairs. They saw her, and, staring at her, moved aside, forming a crude path. It was just like in the movies. She looked toward the end of the path, and there she was. Her grandma, the most important person in her world, sitting there with tears in her eyes. And she knew then, in that moment, that she had to be the strong one. That she would not let the tears fall. That she had to be strong for her grandma.

She was permitted to see her grandpa, much to her parent’s dismay. They believed that she was not strong enough to see the damage that had been done. She entered the sick ward, a half circle room with patients’ rooms lining the wall and a large desk up against the flat wall. She was struck with another sense of deja vu, but this time it was only a blip of memory. She had been in a ward just like this one years before, but only for a moment.

She had been too young to be in the ward when her grandpa was first admitted, when the cancer had first taken hold. She had made a get well card for him, and wanted to see how he was. She made it in and gave him the card before a nursed forced her to  leave. She had cried for hours.But now, she was wishing again that she was young. When you are young, she thought, The reality of situations don’t occur to you, don’t register and manifest themselves into your mind.

Her mom took her hand. “If you see anyone with their eyes closed, don’t worry, they’re just sleeping.” For a brief instant the girl felt hatred towards her mother. I’m not a kid! She wanted to scream. But she didn’t. Instead, she walked forward into  the room where her grandpa was.

It was worse than she thought. He didn’t look human, he seemed to be part of the machine that was breathing for him. The machine, in her mind, was a parasite, sucking away all hope she had left. Wires and tubes protruded from his arms, large machines took up most of the space in the small area. There were no chairs, there wasn’t a bathroom, the only normal thing in the room was a T.V. playing depressing news stories on a loop. In an instant, the gravity of the situation hit her. Hard. This wasn’t a place where people came to get better. This was a place for them to die.

This was her last chance at a goodbye.

The nurse practitioner came into to see them. She liked him, because he didn’t lie and use bombastic words like the doctors did. He didn’t treat her like an infant. He told them that it didn’t look good.

There were lots of complex terms and test involved in her grandpa’s imprisonment  at the hospital, in that sterile, horrible room, but the short of it was this. Her grandpa’s heart attack had been the bad kind. But, in her mind at least, anyone could recover from a heart attack. It was the fact that he had a history of cancer that was killing him. The fight against cancer had made his body weak, a shell of the lively man he once was. The prognosis wasn’t good. Even if he did make it out, he would have brain damage and probably would never walk again.

She wanted him to die. She couldn’t live with seeing him the that. Her grandma wasn’t strong enough to take care of him, so he would have to be put in a home. She didn’t want that for him. She didn’t want him to suffer. So, the only thing she wanted for was the sweet release of death.

Her dad asked for a minute alone with the nurse. In reality, it was only about ten or twenty minutes, but to her it was an eternity. Visiting hours were over, and yet no one asked them to leave. It was a strange, surreal understanding between doctor and  patient, that they knew when things were very bad.  Then she asked for a moment alone. They gave it to her, it was the least they could do.

The wave of tears hit her as she walked in. It was dark out, and the lights in his room were dimmed, even though he had not woken up the entire time they were there.  She said everything she should have said for the past years. She told him how sorry she was that they hadn’t spent enough time together, that she always took him for granted, to please just get better, but she knew, oh how she knew, that things would have to get worse before they got better.

She walked away.

Her grandma’s version of events was heart-wrenching. He’d had stomach pains, and they couldn’t get rid of them, Her grandpa was a stubborn man, not one to easily admit he was sick. He’d told the girl’s grandma, “I’m sick.” Those were his last words. Those were terrible last words.

She had to go to school, but she felt that there was a ticking time bomb in her chest the entire time. She realized some things those few days she was at school. She realized that her friends would be there to listen and give a hug. She learned that her teachers were great people who truly cared about her. And, most importantly, she learned that the guy she’d liked for the past two years didn’t seem care about her at all.

Finally it happened. She was in English, and they were editing their writings. The intercom crackled to life, announcing that she had early dismissal. She looked at the door for a good five seconds before moving. Her teacher took her paper, telling her not to worry about it, that it would be done for her. Her friend that she was sitting beside gave her a look, then a quick hug. Be strong, the hug had said. Be strong. On her way out the door, her best friend jumped up and hugged her. It felt like goodbye.

She walked out into the empty hallway, it gave off the air of a mexican stand-off. Because there was her mom, standing in the middle of the hallway with her arms open.

“Is he--Is--Is h-he--gon-?” was all she managed to get out before her mom nodded, and she rushed into her mother’s waiting arms.

The next few days were a blur of tears and holding tightly to the people she cared about most as if she was going to lose them, too. She didn’t attend the whole funeral, she couldn’t, so her mom’s parents took her out shopping. “It’s what he would have wanted,” Her mother had said, for her to be happy. It amazed her that everyone was there. Family she didn’t even know she had, friends of her mom, her dad, everyone.

She would tell her friends later that the in in the casket was not her grandpa. He was a stuffed man, a shell, a useless and disrespectful reminder of what they had lost and the pain that was to come.

It still keeps me up at night, the things I didn’t say, the things I didn’t do. But, I keep moving on. Murphy’s Law states that if something can happen, it will happen, and I guess I learned that the hard way.