If I could grieve,
The half an hour spent next to you in the car begging you to keep listening, to take long breaths, to stay with me – watching as your eyes remained closed, breathing ragged, tongue trapped between your teeth.
The seconds it took for Doctors in the ER to cut off your black polka dotted shirt from your comatose body, your clothes a mere distraction from your erratic heart and flailing lungs.
The hour spent watching a room full of people trying to resuscitate a child, no longer able to breathe
Nights spent on your ICU bed, anchored by the touch of your smooth cold foot in my hands, eyes on the monitor, trying to see if the green, blue and yellow sine waves would explain what, sedated and paralyzed, you couldn’t
A summer spent in the hospital – nights and days blurring together, the only rhythm that of shift changes and assessments and x-rays and rounds.
The first time a drug knocked you out for 14 hours – your eyes closed, your every breath a gift from a silent, impassive machine, your body unresponsive, deceptively calm, your mind fighting unimaginable battles.
Your ingenuous heart willingly offering up your hands or feet to be poked and prodded by someone for a blood draw, all in return for a mumbled ‘sweet girl’.
Holding on to you and rattling off stories with not a modicum of sense, trying to distract you from whatever made your eyes tear, lips pout and heart rate spike, knowing that if I failed to calm you down, calmness awaited you on the other end of a clear syringe filled with oblivion
Your tears as you were rolled off with strange men and women in green scrubs and masks – awake and aware, knowing only that you were to get a new ‘necklace’ to help you breathe, seeing with unbelieving eyes that we stood aside and let you go in to this unknown all alone, not knowing that this was the only fight we had left to give.
The vacuous look in your eyes when you opened it to look at the world around you through the mist of morphine and sleep medicines, your pain suppressed, along with your light.
Having to deny you water everytime your lips pursed together to mime ‘wa’, knowing that this is the only thing you had been asking for, every single day, these never ending four weeks
If I could grieve, any of this, I would perhaps not have enough of me left for the grief yet to come. And so I make this list – adding every single thing I will one day come back to grieve.