Hospital Time, 3

Day 16

A really long time ago, I emerged from the old New York Hospital on York Avenue on a breezy June morning. Baby Sophie, just under three months old and weighing around 12 pounds, was newly diagnosed with infantile spasms, and back in her iron crib on the bleakest of wards. Someone was giving me a break, so I’d left the hospital and walked a few blocks. I remember this vividly and recalled it this evening as I drove home from UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital the misty rain falling, the windshield wipers swishing, an echo of the oxygen being piped into Sophie’s crashed lungs, her father spending the night with her. I was thirty-one years old and remember looking at the people rushing to and fro on the city streets, intent on their lives and on living, how everyone and everything is intent on lives and living even as your own life is suspended in the weird ether (the air beyond the clouds) of the hospital. I remember thinking how odd this was, how time could stand still for some (us) and keep moving for others (everyone else). There’s everyone and then there’s us. I think I said that once in a different context, but it comes back to me now, tonight, on the eve of Sophie getting both a tracheostomy and a g-tube in an attempt to help her fight this vicious pneumonia. That, and the fact that lives are always ending and beginning again. Our lives are ruined, my friend Jody said one day as we walked the streets of New York with our babies in their carriages, their diagnoses heavy hanging, yet I knew what she meant, even then. Our lives were ruined, but we had new lives ahead of us, and our girls would lead us, their miraculous spirits. That is what I’m choosing to think, some twenty-eight years later. I’m nearly sixty. I believe wholeandbrokenheartedly that Sophie has chosen to fight and live, a life ending and beginning again, so after her I will follow. Please think of her tomorrow and every day after. I am ever so grateful for all the love bestowed on us, for the ease with which you hold us. I feel it. Thank you.