My grandma and I are seated in a waiting room outside the emergency room. Ambulances wail outside, people wail inside.
I am holding Grandma’s hand. Her head, formerly bowed in prayer, is now bobbing from exhaustion. Her eyes pop open when a nurse rushes by, or a wheelchair tire squeaks. For that brief second, she doesn’t understand where she is, and there is a moment of calm on her face. But then she looks around the room in a panic, suddenly aware of what is happening, and she cries anew, before once again bowing her head to pray and falling asleep.
For a control freak, there is no worse place to be than a hospital.
You have no control over time. You have no control over what is happening. You have no control over the outcome.
I want to do something, and yet all I can do is sit here.
I remember the scene in Larry McMurtry’s book Terms of Endearment when the mother, played by Shirley MacLaine in the movie, begs the nursing staff to give her daughter a shot because she cannot bear to see her in pain any longer.
I cannot bear to see those I love in pain. I watch her wake again with a start and then slip away, and my heart shatters in a million pieces. When my grandma falls asleep again, I let go of her hand slowly, finger by finger, and, as if led by a sign, head to the chapel.
It is tiny. There are four pews underneath a stained glass window of a cross surrounded by peace doves and trillium, elegant three-petal white blossoms that seem to float from dense green leaves resembling tiny hostas. Locals consider them a harbinger of spring, but I always considered them a harbinger of hope, the first sign that winter was over and beauty was about to be reborn across the state.
A tiny smile crosses my face.
Hope.
Will my grandfather see another spring? Another trillium? Another day?
We too often take the beautiful routine of our daily lives and the people we love for granted until tragedy strikes out of the blue, a lightning strike on an otherwise sunny day.
I shut my eyes, lower my head and pray.
I hear a whoosh of the chapel door opening and then soft footsteps. I turn.
Holly is standing in the aisle.
“I got here as fast as I could,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
She slides in the booth and holds me, and then we both pray.
I look up and down the hospital corridor. When the coast is clear, I give the vending machine a good kick.
“Boy, I guess you really want those Funyuns,” Holly says.
I kick it again.
“I’m guessing that’s probably meant for me,” she adds. I smile. “Here, let me give it a shot.” Holly doesn’t lift her foot, instead she jabs a hip into the machine—as if she’s a maniacal hula dancer—and the Funyuns pop free.
“It’s all in the hips,” she says.
We take a seat in the hallway. My grandma is now surrounded not only by Leah and Noah but also a rotation of old friends, including Rita. Another beauty of small town life: people show up in force when you need them.
I eat a Funyun—they still taste the same as they did when I was little, like a faux onion ring—and then I place one on my left ring finger.
“Did you do this when you were little?” I ask.
Holly looks at me. She is not dressed up as anyone or anything today. There is no theme. Her face is free of makeup, her hair in a messy ponytail, and she is wearing a Bears hoodie. She looks just like the girl I met in college.
“Wear my food?” she asks.
I hold my Funyun finger out and examine it. “I used to pretend I was married, just like my mom and grandma. What happened to me?”
“Almost all little girls mimic their moms and pretend they’re married,” Holly says. “It’s natural.”
“But that’s all it’s ever been for me,” I say. “Pretend.”
“Susan, you have carved out an incredible life. You have a successful small business that is both your career and passion. You are loved by family and friends. You’re smart, funny and well traveled. None of that is pretend.” Holly grabs the Funyun off my finger and eats it. “Gross.”
I smile.
Holly continues. “What’s pretend is the pressure women like us place on ourselves to be perfect in society’s eyes. We must have a husband. We must have a family. But what we must do first is be happy and fulfilled, or those around us won’t. We don’t need a man to do that.”
“I know that,” I say. “I do. But when I look at my grandparents, and how they’ve been there for each other through thick and thin, and what my mom had at my age, part of me wants that.” I look at Holly. “And I don’t think I want to grow old alone. I’d love to share my life with someone.”
“You have me,” she says. “You’ll always have me.”
“I know,” I say. “But life happens. What if you fall in love? Move away? What if Noah and Leah fall in love? What happens when...”
“Don’t say it!” Holly says. “It’s like talking about an illness and showing it on your body. It makes it real.”
“Do you ever feel like a failure for not being married at our age?”
“Sometimes. There’s a lot of societal pressure still on women of a certain age who aren’t married. It’s an unfair stigma, as if something is wrong with us.” Holly looks down the hall. “But I love being single. I love my career.”
“I do, too,” I say. “I think, for me, the loss of my parents at such an early age made me feel like I should be alone, that perhaps my family’s ‘bad luck’ might rub off on someone else. I also think, for a long time, I couldn’t have survived the loss of someone else I loved in my life. This year, my grampa, everything has sort of coalesced to make me ask myself if I’ve ever really given anyone a chance.” I look at Holly. “I just can’t imagine losing my grandparents and being all alone.”
She grabs my hand and continues. “You will never be alone,” Holly says. “I promise you.”
I put my head on her shoulder and cry until the shoulder of her gray hoodie turns dark.
“Susan Norcross?”
I look up. A nurse is standing before me in scrubs.
“Your grandmother is looking for you,” she says. “Dr. Straube is with her right now.”
The steady beep of the heart monitor matches the one in Jordan’s room.
My grandfather is sedated and out cold following the anesthesia. He is sleeping with his head elevated and tilted to one side.
“How’s our Santa doing?” a nurse says, checking his vitals.
He looks nothing like Santa right now. His skin is ashen, his cheeks sunken, his white hair standing on end, his mouth open but unable to emit a booming laugh.
The only twinkling light is on the monitor.
“He’s a lucky one,” Jackie, the nurse, says.
Jackie is—what?—in her midtwenties now, I think. She used to come into the store as a girl all the time, and she comes every Christmas now to get a picture with her husband and baby girl.
My grandfather suffered only a minor heart attack, a miracle considering he had a 98 percent blockage in his left anterior descending artery. A one hundred percent blockage is called the “widow maker.”
“And you are a miracle worker, Mrs. Claus,” Jackie says, walking over to rub my grandma’s shoulders. “You called 9-1-1 so quickly, I hear.”
“Wasn’t me,” my grandma says. “Leah got him to chew and swallow an aspirin before he lost consciousness, and then Noah performed CPR. I have a wonderful family.”
The room starts to feel claustrophobic. I can see my grampa’s face as I was storming out of the bookstore. I can hear his voice clear as a bell.
Your grandma and I aren’t going to be around forever. We want you to have someone in your life. I was being selfish. If you want to blame someone, blame me. Blame me, Susan!
I rush out of the room.
“You did this to him,” I say to myself, my face in my hands. “Blame yourself.”
“You didn’t do this.”
I move my hands.
My grandma is looking at me.
“I’m so sorry, Grandma. I’m so, so sorry.”
She pulls me into her embrace. “I know you are, honey,” she says. “But it’s not your fault. He’s old. Too many Manhattans and snickerdoodles and not enough exercise. I should have acted sooner. I noticed he was getting so winded over the holidays.
“He’s going to be okay,” she continues. “Nothing a couple of stents won’t solve right now.”
She looks at me, her voice hitting the words “right now” hard. They hang in the air.
My grandma is telling me he won’t live forever. She is telling me none of us will. But I know she is also telling me to appreciate these moments in life even more.
“I think your grampa’s heart has always been a bit too full of love and a bit too full of sadness,” she says. “That’s why it finally needed a little extra help.”
She takes my face and holds it in her tiny hands.
“You know what they’ve always said about Santa, don’t you?” Grandma whispers. “People are mistaken thinking Santa comes down the chimney. He really enters through our hearts.”