RAW EMOTIONS: HELLO AND GOODBYE, AIRPORT VS HOSPITAL

Raw emotions, unrehearsed moments of reality, happen in two places: The airport and the hospital.

That’s where hello and goodbye emotions live that no one plans for.

A hospital visit turns into a gut wrenching ordeal. An airport drop-off turns into the saddest day ever.

Is there anything to do to prepare for this? No, there isn’t.

But it is still a learning moment if you can bear it.

As a baby boomer with bonafides, I’ve seen and heard plenty. So has everyone in the class picture on top.

For better or worse, I share plenty on the blog you’re reading (and thinking about joining.)

With that said, this is the theme song for today’s post.

You say yes, I say no
You say stop and I say go go go, oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello

I say high, you say low
You say why and I say I don’t know

It’s from a new English band called The Beatles. Everyone in the picture remembers them from The Ed Sullivan Show.

Raw Emotions At A Hard Hospital Goodbye

My mother in law lived downstairs in our multi-generational home.

One night she had a headache. I made her a cup of tea which cures everything if you happen to be English. And she was.

She was a WREN in WWII, a signaler to ships sailing into the harbor.

Her headache got worse and she went to the hospital where we learned she’d had a stroke.

Two days later she passed. In between we stayed with her. Communication was limited to talking to her and feeling her squeeze hands in response.

We had family stay with her day and night, with the overnight shift handled by two of the best women ever born.

One day Judy was making plans and cooking food and seeing friends; a short few days later there was nothing anyone could do.

She stopped squeezing our hands when the nurse told her the stroke was not survivable.

It stunned everyone to silence. We were helpless, the doctors and nurses were helpless, while the sand dropped through the hourglass one last time.

Everyone who knew her felt the raw emotions of loss. Her life was a testimony to persistence, resilience, and the spirit of adventure. One of her regrets was missing out on an African safari.

That’s the sort of lady she was, ready to go and keep going even as she was leaving us.

Engagement, Then The Airport

The day I proposed to my wife, her mother seemed to show up like she’d been waiting at the Los Angeles airport for just such a moment.

My “Will you marry me” turned into a set of plans that covered every possibility, every contingency, except for weather. It was Oregon. And it rained.

After the planning we drove her to PDX, parked, and went in together. It was one of those ‘life is moving so fast’ moments.

With the birth of each grandkid, she showed up the same way: fast. Nothing was going to get by her. Not a spectator in life or bench scrub, but a front line player on the first string, she was a English woman with a college education in domestic science.

Which made her a triple threat. She grew up with English manners, learned more about it in college, and saw how America often got it wrong.

During one visit early on, she got a phone call from one of her friends about his husband. He’d taken a fall. She swung into action like a pro, packed up, made a few calls, and was ready to go.

From the call about her husband to jumping out at the airport she set the world record for getting on a plane.

I like to think it was half an hour, but probably forty-five minutes.

That goodbye was an omen for the future we weren’t prepared for, a future of living together with her husband in assisted living. It was a future that eventually included a consolidation of everyone under one roof with me assuming the role of 24/7 home caregiver.

It was the best of times and the worst of times.

About The Top Image

It’s a high school reunion picture like any other high school reunion picture. The difference is it’s my high school class.

Everyone in it has shared raw emotions at some point in their lives, whether with parents, partners, kids, or friends.

We were a group defined by a place in time, namely 1973.

Some of us could have been academically promoted to 1972, or flunked to 1974, but the 1973 class is the ’10’ class. (9+1 = 10, 7+3 = 10)

It’s a cohort of aging youth, of promise and fulfillment, of creating the better world we dreamed of almost fifty years ago. Did I just say “FIFTY YEARS?”

How’s it going so far? Still making friends?