I couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t anger; it was despair.
I’d flown from San Francisco to Honolulu not knowing whether I’d find my son alive, being kept alive on machines, or — that alternative was too horrid to think about.
The plane ride itself – on what? Honolulu Air? purchased, as one could do back then at the airport counter–was a trial in itself. A woman was going to her daughter’s wedding and let everyone know. Strangers were celebratory. I felt in a coffin then.
To distract myself, I averaged grades for my students. High school students — I had four classes of them, full. It was something to do, mid-term grades. A man sat next to me and asked.
It turned out — some sort of grace descending–I seized everything–that he was a priest. He’d “pray for” my son. I almost cried. I couldn’t cry. Numbness, confusion, fear do not invoke tears.
I felt stunned.
The arrival at the jubilant airport–one I had been to a few short years ago–for his wedding, actually, then–not as happy an affair as one could wish for and yet it had happened. And then not happened, dissolved.
Now. Oh, what was the now I was going to as I sat on that plane?
I took a cab, an extravagance then, on top of the airfare, and got to the small hospital, rushed inside with my suitcase and–
and the first thing I saw was a coffin.
In the lobby of a hospital, a coffin, black, decorated. The time was Halloween, I remembered, and so the coffiin, draped in orange crepe paper and cardboard bats–on display as a note of holiday cheer.
I couldn’t do anything. It would take time to complain. . . and to whom? I must find out where he was, if he was. Oh, it was so very horrible.
I found the floor, the ICU, the man I called my son kept alive with tubes and an incubator, but still sort of alive.
That was the beginning. . . and then. . . we had a reprieve of twenty-seven years. How could I complain?
He didn’t need a coffin for twenty-seven more years.
I’d walked past that anger back then, walked past the grief, the Halloween display, and faced weeks of tension and then years and then.