Last week on the way to work I was at a stoplight waiting to make a left hand turn. While I sat there, the sounds of a siren could suddenly be heard. Within seconds, a fire truck came into the intersection and turned right. Immediately following was an ambulance, their sirens blaring and on the tail of the fire truck. The light turned green, I made my turn, and within a block was directly behind the fire truck and ambulance. I watched as the firemen jumped off the truck, the straps of their overalls dangling by their waist, one grabbing a stretcher, another a black bag, all of them running up the incline of the yard.
Suddenly, a woman my age came running out of the house, her face contorted with anguish, waving for the firemen to hurry. She ran back into the house and they followed her. This happened within seconds, oncoming traffic cleared, and I was able to drive around the fire truck and ambulance and continue on to work.
I remembered what my dad would say when encountering something like that. “Somebody is having their worst day ever,” and then would tell us to say a prayer for them. When he was dying and my mom could no longer manage his pain, Mark and I were there with our three-year-old, Maggie, and she told Mark to call an ambulance because he needed to go to the hospital. In her own anguish at that moment she said, “And tell them no sirens. I don’t want sirens.” It was a warm September night, and I walked out of the house, sat on the porch, and sobbed.
My parents’ neighbor, Shirley, came over and sat next to me. She asked why I was crying and I said, “My dad will never be in this house again. Once he leaves and goes to the hospital it’s over.” She said that wasn’t necessarily true and yet we all knew that to be the case. He got admitted into the hospital, was put on a morphine drip, and never came home again.
Mark loved my dad and grieved his loss greatly, but he had a wife who was bereft and needed a steady hand on her back to keep her upright when she’d rather stay in bed all day every day. It was a group effort between him, our Will that came three weeks later, and Maggie, that saved my life, that showed me that deep loss can be integrated into life, that moving forward is possible.
Little did I know that 28 years after that, I’d be in my own anguish, the details of an impossible death laid before me in a police station. Mark, the same age as my dad when a sirenless ambulance pulled up in front of the house, me, the same age as my mom when death came pounding on the door.
Last week I went to California to see that third child of ours, the beautiful dancer that came four years after my dad died. I arrived in Los Angeles, in the Southwest terminal I’d been in twice before when we were coming home from seeing Mal. The first time was when we moved her there, when Mark and I toasted late morning iced coffee to doing our job, to letting our youngest claim her future even if it was hard as hell for us to let her go. The second time we flew home from there was after a visit with her as tourists, Mark at the gate catching up on work emails, me in an airport shop buying a sweater because I was freezing. The restaurant was still there with people having breakfast before their flight, the place we bought our iced coffee. There was also the exact same shop in the exact same spot where I bought my sweater. It was as if I suddenly entered a time capsule except something was missing.
One of my favorite photos is of our young family at a lake near the Canadian border that Mark’s mom took. She booked a cabin when we traveled to see her and it was surrounded by pine trees. We loved it, and there we were frozen in time with our three little kids, who already had been planted with the seeds of adventure from their dad.
Like I was taught to do, I said a prayer for the women frantically waving for help from the driveway of her home that one morning on my way to work, and think about her every time I drive by. I’ve even thought of leaving her a note saying I hope everything turned out okay, but if it didn’t I don’t think I want to know.
Yesterday I was a young mom with three kids, married to a newly appointed assistant professor who was trying to get tenure and a lab up and running. I blinked and thirty years went by, I blinked again and my professor was gone. Maybe it was the way I was raised, maybe it’s life experiences, but I knew as those early, hard days of raising a family unfolded before me that it was to be cherished, and so I have to believe that while this one precious life guarantees nothing it also promises more to come.
