The Goodbye Girl

Recently, I spent six hours researching laryngospasm and malignant hyperthermia. When your toddler is about to undergo surgery, many words creep out from the recesses of a Google search or ten, and these were the three that kept me awake.

I don't pretend that I am unique; the only parent who has ever lost a night's sleep before placing her child's life in a stranger's hands.  Bus drivers.  Babysitters.  Soccer coaches and camp counselors and crossing guards.  These routines have proven effective in rendering my neuroses softer, albeit ever present.  Like the hand that remains in the air long after the answer;  never asking a thing.  

It's just that after you bury a child, you've buried a child.  And there is no going back to before you held the shovel.  

Before my daughter died, I'd have thought about these things.  Growing up in the days before the internet, in my spare time I would read the medical encyclopedia.  I would diagnose my siblings accordingly, from the common cold to lupus and brain tumors, ever the attentive medical professional. Once, my little sister remembers waking up to my nose nearly touching hers, just to ensure that she was still breathing.  Eventually, due to a significant amount of communal and self-inflicted anxiety, this book was hidden from me indefinitely.  

The sudden death of my daughter has been absolutely devastating in all of the imaginable ways; however none have proven more debilitating than my intuition that night.  After a lifetime of being told not to worry, she died.  And in my mind, every other logical, possible outcome will always follow. The sound of my phone in the desk is a heart attack.  The thunderstorm, an old tree through their windows at midnight.  The uneven sidewalk is seven stitches and a skull fracture, and a 30 minute field trip to Purina Farms is a panic attack in the parking lot.  Tragedy is not the exception for me anymore, it is the expectation.  Death is no longer inevitable, it is only, always, imminent. 

There were a thousand goodbyes in my mind, before we ever said hello.  Every day I told him, as though it would be our last together.  In the car and at the table, during the movie and the conference and the lunch date.  Sometimes my hand would gently rest atop him and sometimes it lay at my side, paralyzed.  "I love you," I'd tell him.  "Thank you for being here.  Goodbye."   She never heard me say those words, and so I wanted to be sure he did.  Just in case.  

It's hard to live life this way; to maintain composure and dinner dates and friendships around people who don't understand.  What it's like to be told, over and over that everything is fine by intelligent, competent professionals who have no reason to humor the pull in your stomach.  Only to abruptly find that nothing is fine, nor will ever be fine again.  I cannot discount the joke that her death has made of my sanity, and my ability to trust in life again.  Which is precisely why I need to celebrate weeks like this.  

As I sat in the waiting room, counting the minutes (37) before his surgeon appeared in the doorway, I wondered many things.  Was he asleep before he knew to be scared?  Had his doctors skipped their morning coffee and does pacing make the time pass faster?  I looked to his father and I asked if he was nervous, and he assured me for the tenth time that morning, that he wasn't.  

"I am."  I told him.  "I'm really scared."  

He chuckled, looking up from his iPad then.  "And yet," he said, placing his hand on mine,  "Here you are."

There was a conflict in my head just then, as I realized that this time I hadn't said goodbye. In all of my anguish and apprehension that morning, a momentary lapse as the nurses gently took him from my arms.  He was kicking and wailing into the hall, and I had kissed both his cheeks and I'd said, "Be strong, buddy.  I'll see you soon."

And then, I did.  



















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