These Walls
Louis Forgione
Dad and I stepped out of the car in the hospital parking lot and looked up at the fourth floor together. Every other room had its lights on, though that didn’t tell us much about where she was. There was a knot in my stomach as we walked through the late October cold to reach the front doors of Raritan Bay Medical Center. I had an idea of what I was in for inside.
Dad sat me down when I got back from school earlier that day and told me a sanitized version of what was going on. I’d been between tearing up and bawling my eyes out at half-hour intervals since then. It started the night before–what feels like a lifetime ago now–when Steve drove Mom to the hospital for something. Stomach pain, was it? I was busy on the computer doing history homework, and seeing one’s mother doubled over on the couch isn’t exactly a sight one wants to stare at. It isn’t a car crash. The carnage isn’t readily visible, and there aren’t enough degrees of separation to derive any entertainment from it.
We scurried to the front desk and were given visitor ID cards to tape onto our shirts. Gold Wing, fourth floor ICU. The young woman at the desk spoke with a familiar Puerto Rican accent, letting a flipped ‘r’ slip in the word floor. This was the same hospital where I was born fifteen years earlier, and for the first third of that decade and a half my family lived in Perth Amboy, so I’d heard that plenty. To claim I was comforted by that familiarity would be a lie. Right then I wasn’t concerning myself with sentimentality.
Following the directions we received at the front desk, Dad pressed a button to call an elevator a few yards away from where we had entered. When it arrived and we walked in, I pressed the button for the fourth floor, my hand shaking as I lifted it from my side to perform the action. An uncomfortable silence–not because of anything we did, but because of the situation. A few moments later and the elevator reached its destination without any detours. Marching through the ICU, we saw Steve on the phone. Sal was on the other end. My two older brothers were talking about the next move while Dad and I took seats next to Mom’s bed.
It’s hard to remember what was said, but how I felt is burned into my memory. My hands still shaking and the knot in my stomach still as tight as before, I held my mother’s left hand and gave as gentle a squeeze as I could. She had been under the knife last night, and her colon was still recovering from the shock of the operation. The nurses told us her colon wouldn’t allow a bowel movement to take place until it recovered, which would take a few days. Steve then told me and Dad that it was a tumor the size of a baseball (he gestured the shape with his hands, were the visual in our minds not enough), removed just in time. Waiting any longer on it may very well have been the end of her right then and there.
I had to walk out for a moment. I sat down at a squishy wooden chair with leather faux padding in a hallway and balled my hands together and tilted my head toward my knuckles, my elbows set on my knees. My lips shook as my closed eyes welled up, holding back another wave of sorrow diluted with terror. With nothing but the lonesome, cold hallway walls to comfort me, I collected myself and went back to Mom’s room in the ICU.
About two hours had passed, Dad decided it was time for me to head home. It’s nine o’clock on a school night, and you don’t need to be here if you don’t want to. I didn’t know what I wanted, really. If I went home, I’d be abandoning her, and if I stayed I’d be behind in school. School. What a funny thing to have been worrying about then. What did it matter? Nixon created the EPA? Well, my mom has stage four cancer! I was drowning in a self-centered bitterness that even at the time I thought lacked justification. As dad and I made it to the ground floor to leave the way we had come, we happened upon a narrow hallway that led to what a sign described as a “prayer room.” Our detour had taken us right inside.
The walls were as white as any other in the building, the only difference being the reverent lighting: nine or ten lights placed on the floor, with about equal distance between each one, crept upward to create an ethereal effect. There were eight pews in a two-by-four design and a table with numerous holy books further ahead still. The Hebrew Bible was closed while the Christian one next to it was open to a reading I wasn’t focused on making out. On the wall, illuminated, however, was a line from the former and the Old Testament of the latter. Isaiah 40:31: “Those that wait on the LORD shall have their strength renewed.” I motioned to Dad to look at the line in imitation gold lettering. He read it aloud, and I could hear his voice shaking. I looked at him and didn’t see my father for a moment. I saw a man who was horrified at the prospect of losing the woman he was prepared to grow old with. As he returned to being my father, I gave him a hug and held him close. I was only a little taller than him at this point, but already the days of his chin landing on my shoulder in an embrace were over. As we released each other, there was a single tear stain on my shirt.
I didn’t know what to pray for. Were prayers meant to be specific? Whenever I did pray it was for nebulous goals: the prosperity and salvation of all humanity, peace on earth, a “good” school year, the list goes on. Every time my pleas were for personal, individualist reasons, it was as if I had a third hand behind my back with the index and middle fingers crossed as the original pair was clasped–I never thought a higher power would care about my situation in specific.
I wasn’t thinking it at the time, but now I often ponder whether more genuine prayers are sent out into the void from within the walls of hospitals than those of churches. As we began to exit the family prayer room, I looked back at the line from the Book of Isaiah and thought of another story from the Big Book. While the Egyptians were being plagued during Exodus, Moses assured his son Eliezer that he was safe–that God had passed over their house. Had He passed over mine? Why her?
Louis Forgione is a third-year student (undergrad class of 2024) with sights set on the five-year Ed. M program offered by the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.