Stroke
My family sits in the waiting room, waiting for my aunt to die, the slow countdown to doom ticked off in clock ticks and tapping fingernails on wood.
Each face holds out for one last word with a woman already gone except for that last beat of her heart.
She shivers at intervals to the frustrated signals from muscles seeking word from the remote regions of her injured brain, unable to leap over, climb under or move around the road blocks surgery failed to unclog, a traffic jam more intense than any Sunday night’s approach to the George Washington Bridge, silence instead of honking horns, undercut by the hum of life support.
Green lines mark the overheating inside her, while I set wondering about the woman still trapped inside the car wreck of her mind, how panicked she must feel as her brain revolts against her body, a brain slowly expanding so that even the sliced open skull can’t prevent the injury, doctors telling us she has no hope unless the brain swelling subsides, while even they know it is already too late.
What is left cannot speak, and what we all wait for now is for the ticking to stop, the machines to go off, and for us to go home and finally mourn, each of us already praying not for God to save her, but for God to take her and let her rest in peace.
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