Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Kafka had this word over his desk: WARTEN (WAIT).  Every writer must learn to do that while the unconscious works and underground forces prevail.  Maybe countries have to do that too.”

—Erica Jong, “Tears and Fears,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2008

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

So, I was sitting in the waiting room of a hospital last week—waiting. My mother had surgery of a minor sort and the percentages were low that anything would go wrong, but life has taught me that you can't always trust the percentages. Added to that, I'm deeply phobic about anesthesia (harkening back to a hospital experience when I was six) and anytime I or my loved ones go under, I get real anxious. Although my mom is healthy as a horse, she ain't no spring chicken—so I was nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. Animal metaphors aside, I had a bad tummy ache and couldn't concentrate on the stash of F&SF's I'd decide to catch up on. She came through fine, though, and the knot inside my gut started to uncoil when the handsome young doctor came out to tell me so.

My worry wasn't all melodrama, I don't think. Nobody likes waiting rooms, but having once spent a long, hard night in one they hold a peculiar echo for me, layers piled on layers of experience. Even if these experiences are not in the forefront of my consciousness, they always work on me. I really don't like waiting rooms.

My father, really my step-dad, Tom, died ten years ago last October. I've had two fathers. There was my "biodad" who contributed the DNA to make me. I loved him, but we had a troubled relationship—still do although he's been dead nearly twenty-five years. And there was Tom, the father of my heart. Tom was a gift from the Universe for both my mom and me. He was the love of her life, and for me the only parent who gave unconditional love, who made me believe that maybe the world wasn't such a crapper after all. A gift, and not one that every person gets in their life. I feel incredibly lucky to have known him.

In December 1992, ten months before Tom died, I gathered some of my loved ones together for our annual Christmas dinner: my two ex-roommates, Lynn and Carl (now married to one another), my mom, and Tom. These were nice gatherings, everyone enjoyed everyone's company, and I really got into putting on a good show with the food.

So right in the middle of all this—it may have been during after dinner chat, before the obscene dessert, I can't be sure anymore—when everyone was telling stories and laughing, the world came to a standstill. I've tried to describe this sensation before and that's as close as I can come to it. I was sitting there in that room, but I was outside of it, too. I could see everyone talking, but I couldn't hear them anymore. Though I saw all this movement, inside of me everything had gone completely still, the kind of silence and stillness I've never felt before or since. I heard a voice. My impression is that it was deep, but I can't be sure anymore and I can't be sure whether it was male or female, but it was a voice of great conviction. It said, "This is the last Christmas you will all spend together like this." With those words came the utter conviction that one of us would die before the next Christmas. I didn't know who, but I suspected it was one of my parents. Then it was like the bubble burst and I was back in the room just as before, only trying hard to pretend nothing had happened, to deny what had happened.

Now, I hear you thinking: PJ had too much cooking sherry, too much wine with dinner, too many aperitifs. I did drink that night, but I was not drunk, and after that experience, cold sober. Yeah, I know how much that scenario sounds like a bad piece of fiction, and I do write fantasy...but this happened to me. As much as I put it down to excess imagination or bad brain chemistry or alcohol or whatever, I also had a deep conviction that it wasn't any of those things. I didn't tell anyone—God, I felt so foolish just contemplating it! But I had this sense of the clock ticking, of waiting. That sense only grew over the months.

I felt desperation in that waiting place, helpless, unable to do anything but wait, and still I had that reluctance to talk about it because of the fear of looking foolish. I began reading up on spiritual matters and found that the experience I'd had was not unknown. It had happened to other people. This wasn't especially comforting (except to know I wasn't alone) because these types of experiences tended to be portentous. I'd had premonitions before—sometimes trivial, sometimes not--but just enough that my friends jokingly called me "Spooky."

My parents decided to go back east on vacation and I began to focus all my worry on that trip, sure something would happen to them back there. But they came through fine. I'd put so much energy into worrying about that trip that the knot in my stomach began to uncoil. Autumn arrived and I really began to feel silly. Here I'd been worrying myself sick for months over something that was probably the result of mixing my liquor and I finally relaxed enough to tell Lynn about the whole thing. We had a good laugh about it over dinner one night. Two days later, just after dinner, my father collapsed with an aortal aneurysm.

Ironically, that isn't what killed him. They repaired the aneurysm, but Tom's heart—that wonderful, giving, loving heart—was so scarred and damaged by life that it just stopped beating. They revived him three times but in the end they couldn't save him.

We got the word in the wee hours of the next morning. It was hard to take in at the time, but the nurse attending us in the waiting room—a big bear of a Jamaican man and one of the most compassionate souls I've met—said that if Tom had lived, his life would have been greatly diminished. He'd have been an invalid, and that would have been a living death to Tom, who had always been active. "Maybe his soul decided not to go through that," said the nurse, "not to put you guys through that." Oddly, these words gave some tiny measure of comfort in the weeks of decimating grief to follow, the months and years of learning to live with the scar.

On the drive home from the hospital I asked the Universe politely but firmly to never, ever, EVER send me a premonition again. I was done with them and with the horrible waiting to see if they came true. I haven't had one since.

I really hate waiting rooms. In the larger sense, all of life is a waiting room. We're all going to leave it, one way or another. It's the not knowing how and when that makes us antsy. I've gone through my materialist phase where I figured there was nothing after this life; I've gone through my spiritual phase where I was convinced something more came after. I still think there is an after, but life has a way of wearing down the sharp edges of conviction. I'm not freaked out by death. I don't want to die, but fear of my own mortality really doesn't dominate my consciousness. I'm more afraid of the death of loved ones. Having lost several of them, I feel I've done my share of grieving and don't want anymore. Unfortunately, life rarely asks for our opinion on that score.

So, when I die it's either going to be the Big Fat Nothingness and I won't know or care about anything else ever again, so why worry? Or, I'll get to see all the people I love again. Seeing those loved ones—all sins forgiven, all grievances put aside—has got to be worth the price of admission. Maybe I'll know for sure when the waiting's done.