The ICU of a hospital is suspended in its own surreal bubble. Time means nothing. Things like regular meals, sleep, showering, and coherence slip away. What is left is the sharp scent of antiseptic in your nostrils. The squeaking of rubber shoes on tiled hallways that are garish beneath faulty lighting. Nurses and doctors bustle around and occasionally cluster for loud conversations and short, annoying bursts of laughter. You wander in and out of rooms and accidentally meet the eyes of some other patient's family. You telegraph your fear, sadness, exhaustion, anger, and fatalism to each other before looking away.
No one talks. There's a lot of moaning, sometimes screaming.
A team of white-coated doctors and residents stand in a half moon, staring at us. We have just been informed that if my cancer-ridden mother doesn't have another, emergency surgery RIGHT NOW, she will most certainly die. Her body has been broken and put back together, but the patched-up pieces are still falling apart. We stare at the floor, at a rundown carpet the color of which I cannot recall. The paint peels from the gray walls in a perfect line all the way around the room at chair level.
Finally the consent is given. It is 1:30 a.m. Now we wait.
I am numb. I know I should reach out, say comforting words Cry. Do something. But I feel nothing. Why can't I feel anything?
In this surreal bubble of no-time waiting, I get up, walk down the poorly-lit hallway, and step into an elevator. This is a Catholic hospital and very old, built in 1888 or something. I have seen signs pointing out the location of the chapel--in the basement that has been known to flood. As the elevator sinks down and down, I realize that is where I'm headed.
The lower level hallway is straight out of a nightmare, stretching on and on before me. Battered doors with red biohazard signs loom out of the poor lighting as I pass by. Giant laundry bins and garbage dumpsters stand guard, but other than that, I am alone. It occurs to me, in this area where shootings and stabbings and other crimes of violence are common, that I am probably not very safe. I'm too tired to care.
I make a hard right and come face to face with the chapel's double doors. A dozen different-colored pamphlets line the walls to either side. I grasp the door handle and push my way in.
The change is immediate. I feel it in the air and on my face--there is a calm here. The room is lined with dark brown wooden pews. Off to the right is an old-timey confessional box. Next to that is a screen, and when I walk behind it, I find a worn prayer rug on the floor, facing east. There are more religious icons to the left, a shrine to the virgin mother, a picture of a black Jesus, and probably more that my brain is too exhausted to register.
I look up to find that the entire room is paneled with stained glass. The colors (a mottle of blue, gray, harvest gold and avocado green) suggest these windows were installed in the 70s, maybe even the 60s. I wander around reading each panel, which has a prayer in large gold jaggedly letters printed across them. The pictures show Jesus doing various things, like stretching out a hand to a fallen man. Nothing sinks in until I come to the panel that says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Poor in spirit. That's me. That's why I can't feel anything.
But as I sink into a pew and wrap my coat tighter around me, I do begin to feel. My muscles relax. My eyes blur. My numbness begins to melt--not a lot, just a little--but enough to remind me that I'm still in there, somewhere, inside the surreal bubble. I can still hear the faint crackle of my fire.
It's enough for me to leave the chapel, return to the elevators, and rise back up to the ICU.
