The Account His Mother Never Closed
The Feeling I Almost Talked Myself Out Of
I retired from nursing in March. Thirty three years on the same unit at the regional hospital here on the Florida panhandle, most of it in the ICU, the last eleven as charge nurse on nights. I told everyone the same thing when they asked what retirement would feel like. I said I was looking forward to a quiet season. A garden. Church on Sundays without falling asleep in the pew because I’d worked a double the night before. Maybe a little travel, though I never got further than Tallahassee for a nursing conference in all those years.
What nobody tells you about thirty three years in an ICU is that the instincts do not retire with you. You keep reading rooms. You keep counting breaths without meaning to. You keep a small, stubborn part of your brain always half listening for the sound of something going wrong, even in a kitchen, even in a quiet house, even on a Tuesday that has no business being anything but ordinary.
That Tuesday I had it bad. A tightness under my ribs that had nothing to do with my heart and everything to do with a feeling I could not name and did not trust. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself the same thing on Wednesday. By Thursday morning I could not make myself believe it anymore, and I got in my car and drove the eighteen minutes out to my son’s place on the water without calling first, which is not something I do. I like to be invited. I raised Forrest to like the same thing.
Forrest is thirty six. He runs a charter fishing operation out of a little marina at the edge of town, half a dozen regular boats, scallop season in the summer, red snapper and grouper the rest of the year, and enough repeat customers from three states that he has never once had to advertise. He started it the year after his father died, and I will get to that part, because it matters more than I understood at the time.
I told myself I was driving out there because I missed him. That was true. It was also not the whole truth, and by the time I turned onto his road, I already knew it.