The Persistence of the Waiting

The telephone rang at 6:14PM.

The life I lived until that moment ended.

I am now in a hospital waiting room.

Fluorescent lights hum meeting absolute silence.

My sister is at the end of the hall,

lying in a bed in the intensive care unit.

Her skull was broken by the force of the steering column.

Her brain is bleeding.

The pressure inside her head is rising.

I am sitting in a blue plastic chair bolted to the floor.

The air smells of industrial bleach and floor wax.

I am writing these words because I have no other way to occupy my hands.

I feel hopelessness.

I am a person who likes to solve problems.

There is no solution to a catastrophic brain injury that I can provide.

I cannot reach into her head.

I cannot stop the hemorrhaging.

I cannot sew neural pathways back together with my fingers.

I cannot go back to 6:10PM and tell her to take another route home.

The accident is complete.

I am trapped in the aftermath.

I want to believe that my love for her has a physical power.

It does not.

I am forced to acknowledge that love is not a medical intervention.

My affection does not lower her intercranial pressure.

My memories of our childhood do not repair her shattered frontal lobe.

The monitors are machines.

They track heart rate.

They track oxygen saturation.

They track brain function.

They do not respond to my grief.

They do not respond to my desperation.

They do not respond to my anguish.

The neurosurgeon spoke to us in a small room with no windows.

He used the term "neurological deficit."

He used the term "irreversible damage."

I translate:

They mean my sister might die before the sun comes up.

They mean that if her heart continues to beat,

the woman who knew my jokes is gone.

The woman in her bed is a biological organism,

kept alive by a ventilator.

The tube in her throat breathes for her.

Her brain can no longer tell her lungs to move.

I am grieving for a woman who is still warm to the touch.

This creates a state of cognitive dissonance that is physically painful.

I am terrified that she will die.

I am equally terrified of the life she will have if she survives.

I picture nursing homes, feeding tubes, a sister who does not recognize me.

This hopelessness is not a metaphor.

It is a physiological weight in my chest.

It is a tightness in my intercostal muscles.

A tremor in my hands I cannot stop.

I watch my mother pacing the hallway.

I watch my father stare blankly at a vending machine.

We are breaking apart.

Minutes are infinite.

I check my phone every thirty seconds.

There is no news, only the facts of the injury.

I am powerless.

I am afraid.

I stare at a white wall.

Hopelessness is a cold, flat fact.

It is the only thing I have left.