I had been watching Grey’s Anatomy for a few months before that day.
I never thought it was particularly good, but it had a perfect combination of pandemic TV show qualities: endless, engrossing, and even more endless. Some part of me appreciated that it was a medical show too, even if I didn’t assume its relationship to real-life hospital dynamics went much past scrubs and surgery names. I was living through the biggest collective medical emergency of our times and hadn’t set foot in a medical establishment in twelve long months of pandemic, and so I liked the thought that my media consumption choices were, on some level, connecting me to the most in-crisis part of my world.
So from the safety of my bed in the deep winter and early spring of our first year of pandemic, I let myself be absorbed in the constant drama of this made-up hospital world. From that perspective, the thought that someone (any given person) might have a sudden massive stroke and be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery felt… normal.
That’s what I remember saying to my sisters, anyway, as we were sitting in the parking garage of Beth Israel’s neuro ICU early that Saturday morning. COVID protocols were strict and only one of us was allowed on the ICU floor at a time, so our Dad was there talking to doctors, while Julia, Meredith and I sat in cars in the cold garage.
We didn’t know the full reality yet (thank goodness), and we were panicked, but still steady. The reality we knew:
Mom had had a stroke early that morning. Dad was right there and called an ambulance immediately. She had gotten to the hospital and into emergency surgery in a remarkably short span of time; the doctors taking care of her were some of the best in their field. She was in the ICU, unconscious and hooked up to all sorts of machines, but people survive strokes all of the time, so there was still every reason to hope. (Right?)
I remember telling my sisters that the show I had been watching on and off for months was making this moment feel almost close to normal for me — and noticing, even as I said it, what a ridiculous thought that was. Of course this wasn’t normal. Of course the truth of this moment was more akin to my entire reality, the very ground beneath my feat, cracking and splitting and falling away around me — but I was so very desperate to find even one bit of earth to stand on.
That was one of so many ‘at least’ moments that week: the small ledges I found myself clinging to as the ground was falling away beneath me.
At least Dad had found her so quickly. At least we live close to all these great hospitals. At least we still had reason to hope.
And yes, even — At least I’d been watching a medical drama that had been reminding me how often this happens, how much could still be done in response.
–
The ground kept falling away beneath us, in bigger and bigger chunks as the week went on. It fell away by degrees: first, reality sinking in about just how large of a stroke this had been. (At least she had gotten into surgery quickly.) Then being told there had been another bleed, that there would have to be another emergency surgery. (At least the doctors all seemed good, at least Dad had already gotten to see her.)
The bigger the pieces of ground that were falling into the abyss, the more important the at leasts became.
By Monday, the doctors and social workers called a meeting with all of us to talk about how we wanted to move forward. I joined the meeting in person with Dad, and Meredith and Julia joined on zoom from their car. Lynn was still in Seattle, on the first trip any of us had taken in so very long, to meet her girlfriend’s sick mother while she still could. She could have joined on zoom too but it was a bit too much; we would call to update her afterwards. (At least I love and trust my family so goddamn much, at least we were all in this together.)
Our thoughtful panel of female doctors and social workers broke the news to us the best they could, with their assurances that there was nothing more they could do to make her live, but they could make her last days or weeks as comfortable as possible. They gave us the information for hospice options, said some kind things about what a wonderful family we seemed to be, and gave us the space to decide our next steps between ourselves.
At least she was not gone yet; at least there was time for Lynn to get here and for all of us to be with her.
At least we would be able to give Mom a good death.
–
Months later, I was talking to someone who was trying to offer me good pastoral presence by asking a real, “how are you.” (Key word in that sentence is trying, unfortunately; grieving people can tell when you’re afraid to ask the question and it does not make us inclined to give a full answer.) I really wanted to be real with her and said, with honesty, something about how much I was feeling grateful for. In response this person scoffed a bit, saying something along the lines of, “it’s ok, you don’t have to be grateful.”
Maybe that would have been the right response for someone else, maybe she was assuming my profession of gratitude was for her benefit and not mine. But instead, it left me feeling more unseen than if she had never asked at all.
If each at least had functioned as a ledge to cling to when the ground was crumbling and falling away beneath me, then each gratitude helped build the life boat carrying me through the strange, rushing waters of grief that had come flooding in.
I did, in fact, have to be grateful: I had to have something to hold on to, something solid to rest on so that I was not completely pulled under by the waves that were now battering me constantly. Gratitude was not an idea or a platitude for someone else to feel better about the death that now defined my existence; gratitude was my tether point to life.
(Gratitude is still my main tether point to life.)
–
I haven’t been able to go back to watching Grey’s Anatomy, of course, or any other medical drama. Our culture’s assumption that death is failure shows up too strongly in those imagined worlds (or maybe I just don’t want to hear the constant beeping of ICU machines again, as long as I can help it).
I don’t avoid scenes of death entirely in my media choices (even if that were possible) but I do track them differently. What’s assumed to be important before and after death? Do they show ritual, do they show grieving? How are the dead spoken of, if at all? Who carries the dead with them; is that carrying portrayed as a burden or a gift?
I do feel the death I carry with me as a gift, just as much as my gratitude is necessary for my survival. A heavy gift, that makes my back tense and painful and that places itself as a sadness underneath every other feeling — but still a gift.
At least we were able to give Mom a good death — yes, but as I say it again, this at least feels too shallow. It was the greatest honor of my life to hold my mother in love through her death (an honor upstaged only, perhaps, by that of being brought into life as her daughter at all).
I would reverse it all in a heartbeat and gladly unlearn every one of the deep lessons this year has taught me for even a minute more with her in her living, breathing body — and, at least, in the absence of that possibility, I have the love that I have. I have the gratitude that I have. I have her with me in every way that is still possible, carrying me through every impossible moment ahead.