Moments

There are moments in everyone’s life when time stands still. When you seem apart from yourself, and your world is turned upside down. As I sat in a small white room, slightly nauseous from the smell of disinfectant and sick people I felt that separation. A pallid doctor sat across from me. Her careworn face wore a mask of concern that could no longer quite reach her eyes. She talked, and I nodded and even smiled. I didn’t really hear anything she said.
I just held my fathers hand as he cried.
We drove home in silence. I thought about how I couldn’t even feel the ticking bomb in my chest. Dad thought about… Whatever Dad’s think about in these situations. I hope I never know.
Everything had a detached quality, like a dream. As we pulled in outside the house, my dad broke down again. I gave him a hug. He shook under my arms, and I couldn’t understand why I felt so calm. It would occur to me over the coming months that perhaps it is easier being the one who is sick. I just sat in small white rooms and tried to hold down my lunch while soul scorched nurses tried to make me ‘comfortable’. I didn’t have to wonder what it would be like when I was gone, or whether I could have done anything different. I didn’t have to pick caskets and headstones, or leave flowers on a patch of grass and cry because I cant quite remember the way I used to laugh.
The ironic thing for me, is that in being sick I found myself. The peaceful core beneath the waves of discontent and rage. Despite the drugs, and the operations and the endless parade of those who were grieving me before I have even gone, I was the happiest I had ever been (or at least the most content, for happy is a loaded term). Life was simple, and all the things I had to fear were clear and immediate.
So lie in small white rooms I did, and I chatted with cheerful but sad-eyed physicians, and tried not to scream when they put the last drug on the stand, the one that felt like acid in my veins. I sat and read books, and lost my hair, and occasionally chatted awkwardly with someone from school who would call even though we had barely exchanged a word in six years. I became a bit of a saint, as well. You don’t speak ill of the dead, after all. And dead I was… right?
Wrong.
I have to admit a certain amount of satisfaction in writing that word. My outlook when I was diagnosed was grim indeed, and survival really wasn’t on the cards. But more even than I didn’t feel threatened by death, I wanted to carry on living. I had gained something in being sick that I had never had when I was healthy. I had gained peace. Peace for me was a combination of perspective and strength. I could see my life for what it was, and be happy. Too valuable a gift to easily let go of, my body rallied and I surprised everyone but myself.
I still remember the smile on my doctor’s face when he gave me the news. I think I always will. I sat in another small white room, looking for all the world like a baby bird with my skinny neck and big, bald head. I sat and for the merest moment, I knew what it was to fly. I had conquered the odds. And so for the second time in a small white room, slightly nauseous from the smell of disinfectant, time stood still.
This time though, it was my turn to cry.