Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed

The video

I should not have watched it. I know that. But you always watch it, don’t you. You always look at the thing that is going to hurt you.

It was thirty seconds of the new house. Shelby’s voice, bright and happy, narrating a slow spin through the empty living room with the afternoon light coming in. “New chapter,” she was saying. “So blessed.” And then she turned the camera, and there they were, my mother and my father, my mother laughing with a throw pillow in her hands and my father lowering himself into a recliner with a groan, and Shelby’s voice said the line that I will hear for the rest of my life.

“Couldn’t have done today without Mom and Dad. Best parents in the world.”

Best parents in the world.

I called the ninth time right then, with the video still frozen on the last frame on my screen, my father’s tired satisfied face filling it. My mother answered. I could hear the party in her voice, the good day, the accomplishment. “Carol?”

And I found that I had nothing to say to her. I had spent all day trying to make her understand something, and in one second I understood that the problem was not that she did not understand. The problem was that she understood perfectly, and had made her choice, and the choice was pillows.

“Never mind,” I said. “You’re busy.”

I hung up on my mother for the first time in my life. My hand was shaking. Across the room the red second hand went around and around.

And then I pressed the call button, but not for a nurse.