The Hospital Room

Delivering the same setting through different eyes & different circumstances

It had been hard to break away from the nursery. He could have stood there forever looking at his perfect daughter through the glass. Yet he also wanted to be here looking at the woman who somehow pulled off a miracle. She was sleeping now. The fluorescent lights of the room turned off, which helped it look less like a hospital room. He had never had doubts about their marriage, had never had that impulse to run screaming from the room that Dave had so comically described at lunch the day after his son was born. He stood now looking down at his sleeping wife, a cup with a bendable straw sat on the table near her face. It was a like a badge, a bendable straw for an exhausted miraculous woman. The strongest smile came to him with no hesitation at all. He was a lucky man.

It had been hard to push the button for the elevator. He could have stood there forever putting off the moment and then a blond woman had come and had pushed it herself with a sigh. He needed to be with the woman who had ushered him in this life, who was now hovering at the end of it. It couldn’t be held off, this moment or the next, the moments that would march them both to the end. They would pass either way, whether he was there or not. The door to the room was open. He passed through the threshold and stared at the cup with its plastic straw. The bendable type of straw so the weak and dying didn’t have to exert too much effort to drink. He dropped his coat on the chair next to the bed. She was truly dying.