The sound of the telephone broke into the family’s evening routine. Startled awake, the youngest of the children whimpered tiredly, and appeared to seek the source of the noise, before flopping forward once again onto the timber table-top. The two older children sniggered at their sibling lying on the edge of the plate, causing peas to roll across the table and fall on the floor, to be greedily consumed by the hairy vacuum.
Click. Click. Click. It was important to keep the camera charged and on hand for just such occasions. Blackmail material for eighteenth birthdays and girlfriends and boyfriends was gold.
He came back into the room with the phone still in his hand. Silence overtook the room as the children saw their father, recognising the etched worry and sadness on his face, and she turned around to see what had caused such a quick change in the children’s demeanour. The smile melted from her face.
“I called Jenny to stay with the kids. We need to go. Now, Love” he said gently. She looked at him, confused, not understanding. That wasn’t really true though; she didn’t want to have to understand.
“It’s OK Mum. I’ll take care of the kids until Jenny gets here. You go get cleaned up.” She barely heard the words through the white noise in her head, moving robotically to do the bidding of those around her. Within minutes they were in the car and headed down the dark highway to the city.
Protectively cradling her distended stomach with one hand while absently rubbing with the other, she took deep, cleansing breaths. Laying her head back on the seat and closing her eyes, she willed the tension in her body to release. Beginning with her toes and moving upward through her body, starting over each time she was jolted when the car travelled over a bump on the road. He saw her struggling. He took his hand from the steering wheel to cover hers on her belly, giving a small squeeze of support. She looked at him, her lips lifting in a small smile that couldn’t reach her eyes. She closed them again and went back to her breathing.
The ninety-minute trip was over quickly with time compressed to bring reality closer and closer; a reality they had no time to come to grips with. The reality was pulmonary haemorrhage. That’s what they’d said. Catastrophic they’d said, but not completely hopeless. Ninety minutes was nowhere near enough time to time to accept catastrophic. Not that it mattered if they accepted it or not. There was no choice here. If there was a choice surely no-one would have chosen this.
Within the walls of the hospital, she looked for the rest of her family, finding them in the family room. She couldn’t help thinking that the room should be called the “Pending Room” instead; pending life, pending birth, pending death. What if there was no family? Where did those people go while they waited for life, birth and death? The “Not Family Room”?
She was pulled abruptly from her confused musings when the door opposite opened to give a glimpse of the desperate activity inside. Across the relatively narrow strip of hallway, the battle to keep her brother alive was being lost in increments as each effort failed to turn the tide in his favour. Exhausted medical staff made way for new people, applying pressure, providing CPR, trying to clear airways.
Eventually, the doorway opened again and the team leader shuffled tiredly through into the hallway. Bending in half, hands on knees. This was often the way with these teams. Working with the same patients for years, they became connected, perhaps even friendly. It was inevitable in their field but it was a double-edged sword; when things went badly they lost more than a patient. They gathered themselves, moving towards the family room filled with expectant faces. Expectant, but not hopeful.
The team leader had nothing good to say. “We can keep going if that’s what you want”, they said. “No, we don’t think it will make a difference”, they answered. “We can run another check, but there is no brain activity. It’s all the breathing machine now”, they finished. Her family members stared from one to the other as the reality of the catastrophic event came to fruition, and they knew they were out of choices.
She couldn’t move from the foot of the hospital bed; couldn’t remove her hand from the blanket-covered lump that connected her with the remnants of her brother. Most of the staff had finally left the emergency room knowing that they had been defeated by their greatest enemy. With one last apologetic look in her direction, the last two members of the emergency team left the room, first silencing the machine’s incessant beeping, to monitor the now quiet room from outside, leaving the family to say their goodbyes.
It wasn’t like in the movies, this slow decline to nothingness. It wasn’t like flicking a switch to turn out a light. It reminded her more of a child’s wind-up toy, slowly losing momentum as the internal workings and cogs lost the artificial tension that kept the toy in motion. As the internal workings and cogs inside her brother released the last of their life-sustaining strength, and the machine’s violent green, life-denoting peaks inevitably changed to a staccato rhythm connected to longer and longer stretches of a perfectly-straight death-defining lines, she forced herself to move from the relative safety of her position to the head of the bed.
Holding his hand and absently reaching for a cloth, she wiped a drying, red mark from his forehead and replaced it with a gentle kiss; ensuring that his final touch was one of love, and hoped he knew.
The line went flat.
Perfectly Possible Publishing 