In the Waters of My Mind

My eyes were still open when my hand drew near to my face; I suddenly paused for a moment. I looked at my hands as they clutched the sheet. I let the sheet go, spreading my finders as wide as I could. I raised my arms to the ceiling, with my palms facing upward. I then turned my palms facing downward, able to see the lines on the palms of my hands. Another crack from the radiator had broken my concentration for a moment, but then I remembered. It had been over twenty years since I had done something like this. Back then, the bathroom light that was next to my room in my parent’s home illuminated the bedroom so that I could see my hands. I sat up in bed now. I thought a long time as I drew my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. That's when I thought about my brother, Henry. It had been almost three years since his death, and nothing had triggered me to think about him in this way before. I had been too focused on the last seven years of his life, the last seven tragic years. Seeing my hands up in the air like that triggered another memory of my brother, and family. It was 2:20am according to the VCR across the room. I got up, went to the window, and peered through the blinds to the outside. The moon shined brightly in the night sky, casting the shadows of leafless trees in the snow. The street was quiet, with only a trail of tire treads through the snow. I knew then that I had some writing to do.

***

It was about nine o'clock p.m. Sunday, when I received a call from my sister. I was sitting at my desk working on a software program I had been writing for a customer. The phone rang, and when I picked it up and said, "Hello", my sister was on the other end. She had said the hospital had just called her and wanted my mother and her to come there right away. Earlier that evening, my mother had called the ambulance to come take my brother to the hospital. He had been lying sick on her living room floor since Friday. My sister had come to pick my mother up and follow the ambulance to the hospital. There they had checked him in, thinking everything was going to be OK. From there, my sister took my mother out to Oak Park to have dinner with her family. This was routine for Henry now, succumbing to the alcoholic taste he had developed over the past seven years, getting dried out at a hospital after approaching near death from drinking too much, then starting the process all over again.

This time, I knew it was different. There was some urgency in my sister’s voice, and I knew hospitals, for emergency purposes only, made calls to summons you. Was he near death? I thought to myself. Maybe his vital signs were fluttering and they wanted someone there, just in case. This has happened before, while he was admitted at Holy Cross Hospital's intensive care unit. My mother and I watched as his vital signs fluttered on the machine. "He might not make it through the night", the doctor said. My brother was wearing a chain or two on his arm, and the nurse asked us if we wanted to take them off of him at the time. That let me know he was really in bad shape. She was already trying to get us to take anything of value off of him at that point. He laid there, unconscious, oblivious to us standing over him, almost lifeless.

My sister lived in Oak Park, a northern suburb of Detroit. The hospital was a good 15 to 20 minute drive from where they were. A call to me was only logical because I lived much closer to North Detroit General Hospital, which was just north of the Hamtramck/Detroit border. It would be only minutes away from my home, so I immediately put on my coat and hat, and stepped out into the cool February air. There was no snow on the ground. I got into my van and drove to the hospital. As I drove up Conant Ave., I thought about the reality of him dying. What about his children? I thought. Although Henry wasn't living with his children, they loved him very much, and I hated that they would have experienced something this early in their lives. "I'm getting ahead of myself", I thought, "I must stop thinking of the worse case scenario". I shook myself back into reality. Nobody had told me anything yet; so assuming the worst wouldn't do me any good.

I made it to the hospital rather quickly, and I pulled into the parking lot behind the emergency entrance. As I walked in, the electronic doors slid open. There was a guard and an attendant at the front desk. "My mother was called and told to come to the hospital right away, I'm here on her behalf until she can get here. I am here to see Henry Myrick," I said. "Who are you?" the security guard asked. "I am his brother, Timothy Myrick," I said. One of them looked at me as if out of respect, while the other was concerned with asking more questions. He quickly cut his questioning off, and gave me directions to go to the intensive care unit. That was a bad sign, I thought to myself. He might be dead or dying. I quickly went to the elevator, and got on. The hospital was noticeably quiet, and its corridors were empty and cold, and I remember feeling a little numb as I walked through the hallway. I approached the intensive care unit door and pushed the button to ring the bell.

An Asian nurse came out of the room, and I had to go through the process of identifying myself as well as whom I had come to see. Once through that process, she flatly told me, "Henry is dead". I asked her to repeat herself for verification for myself. She said it again and then added, "What was wrong with him, he hardly had any blood in his body?" Her words were fading now, as I walked away from her, down a connecting corridor with full height smoke glass windows with a view to the outside of the hospital. I leaned on the armrest in the corridor, presumably for wheelchair patients. She was still speaking to me, but my back was to her as I was staring into nothingness, wishing I hadn't heard what she had just said to me. I had taken off my hat, and tears were heaping into my eyes now. Only three of us left I thought. Another family member gone, I said. Snowflakes had begun to fall, and I began to tune her in again. She said there was a small waiting room if I cared to sit down to wait for my mother.