By Lois Hibbert
I don’t know what to do with your clothes.
They’re still in the plastic hospital bag that I left in your room.
It’s been three weeks and I know I need to do something with them. I take them out now and lay them one by one on your bed. It feels like a violation of privacy to handle your underwear, but for now I put it and the sweatpants and your socks in the wash, deferring decisions. I bury the hospital bag in the garbage; I don’t want to look at it.
I didn’t like the tee shirt you had been wearing, because of the image of a gun, even if there was a big X through the gun, but you loved its anti-gun statement. It might have been from some protest you attended or maybe you snagged it at your favourite thrift store where you found so many bargains. They had to cut it off to attach the equipment they hooked you up to.
Your lacy bra, cut in half, no time to unhook it.
When they finally let us see you, after the stream of nurses and doctors in and out of the room slowed, the small puff of the ventilator made it easy to delude us into thinking that you were breathing. That you still had a chance. That surgery at the big downtown hospital could stop the bleed deep in your brain and you could recover.
No time. Images showed the bleed moving, so much already damaged, destroying the essence of you. Surgery only a slim chance of success, and even if you were to survive, you would face long rehabilitation and major disability. You, who were so fast with words, had lost speech when you collapsed, paralyzed on your right side. Already suffering from complicated depression; could we add this to your suffering?
Bleed spreading fast. No time for second opinions. No time.
Decide.
The unthinkable decision. Still, those small puffs made it seem like you were alive.
But you were alive only so someone could benefit from your young, healthy organs. A body blow when you spiked an infection and they could use nothing, nothing. Nothing good out of this nightmare, nothing?
I look in your closet now, the hoodies and flowing dresses you loved, your flowered Doc Martens and black and white Skechers lined up on the floor. If I give them away, will I forget how you looked wearing them?
I cradle the destroyed clothes on your bed.
How can I throw them away as if they had no more meaning than pieces of garbage?