They moved like water.
I know this, even though I wasn’t in the room.
I couldn’t see or hear them precisely, but I know how they moved based on the striations left in their wake. The same way I’ve seen an arroyo wash out in the desert, leaving intricate tiger stripes of sand, I saw gloves and IV flushes. Wrappers that once held alcohol swabs and tubing and sterile mysteries.
The night before I sat outside, as close as legally possible given the COVID protocols, as my person died in the ICU, nine floors above me.
Twice.
We sat in the car, denied entrance, because it was after visiting hours had concluded for the night. This made sense in the logical part of my mind that knew the epidemiological rationale was sound, but the relational mind of ancestry and kinship considered scaling the building, or rushing the guards. I did neither, and not because I’m a compliant and rational being, but because I didn’t know where they had taken him.
Up?
Down?
(Both, it turned out.)
He went to the basement first, where an interventional radiologist navigated his veins to find and stop the bleed that brought him there.
Then he went up to the ninth floor ICU, where his sweet body was center stage to the miracle that is medicine and magic.
We sat just east of the ER, parked akimbo in more than one parking space, refreshing the app displaying lab results whose specific data meant nothing, but general onslaught was profound.
If they are still drawing labs, he is still alive.
Somehow, just after 3am, we knew we could migrate a quarter mile south, back to the hotel where no one slept. Where I listened to Jeremy Wolf guide me through yoga nidra on repeat as I sat bolt upright, transfixed, an animal trapped tenuously safe from the storm that consumed my world.
At 7:30 I made my way into the line of anxious waiters — those whose storms had dried earlier, who knew the protocols to get in.
My body moved like water — the temperature check, the screening questions, the polite request for the room number that held the container of my person. I can know now that I presented my driver’s license, that I said, “thank you,” that I made my way through uncharted territory to new elevators and a sacred realm.
The ninth floor, guided and held by unseen forces, I entered and observed.
They moved like water, and I did, too. Coordinated by something other than my own frantic mind, informed by my experience of being in realms like this before, in my years as an antepartum doula.
Somewhere between life and whatever else exists.
They say that grief is an ocean, but for me it is an ancient inland sea. Dry, and punctuated with things that etched the earth as they lay. The very ground I walk, carved by the memories of moving like water.
Thanks for reading,
K
PS: If you’re reading this in the app, check your inbox as this one came with a substantive back story for paid subscribers.