Baby Steps (24 page)

I was in the kitchen when the phone rang. Our house was shotgun style with an infinity door at the back, and as I stood at the sink rinsing grapes in a colander and thinking that we might like peanut butter and jelly for lunch, I was watching my two-year-old daughter chasing butterflies in the backyard. It was one of those sweet moments. I was thinking how lucky I was to have such a healthy child and to feel so content. When I saw my mother's husband's name on the caller ID, that moment flipped upside down. I knew immediately something terrible had happened. Peter would never call me. Only my mother would call me. I picked up the phone in what felt like slow motion.

“Hello?”

“Lis?” Peter said. He paused, as if he wasn't sure how to say it. My heart began to pound in my chest.

“What happened?” I said, my voice a monotone, my soul hunkering down for a terrible blow.

“Your mother has . . . had a heart attack.”

In movies, sometimes bad news sends someone falling to the floor, the phone dropping to the ground, the recipient of the bad news a crumpled heap on the tile. I just sank into a chair, my elbows sliding across the table. I kept the phone tightly against my ear—I wouldn't let the phone fall. I needed to know everything. I fixated on Easton, running around the yard. She seemed to be moving in slow motion, too.

Peter hurriedly reassured me that the situation was under control. “Everything's going to be all right,” he said quickly. “She's alive. They're stabilizing her.”

Alive? When I heard the words “heart attack,” I hadn't even considered the possibility that she might not be alive. “It's serious. I think it's serious. I can hear it in your voice,” I said.

“No, no, it's going to be okay. I'll call you. They gave her medication to stabilize her. Just wait.”

“I'm coming to Amsterdam.”

“No, don't come. It will be okay. The doctors have it under control.”

Part of me wanted to believe him, and part of me knew he was wrong. I agreed to wait, but with a tidal wave of misgivings. As soon as I hung up the phone, I called my mom's sister. “I should go to Amsterdam,” I told her.

“Respect his wishes,” Aunt Laurie said. “Give him a day.”

It was a torturous twenty-four hours. I knew in my gut I should go, but I waited, pacing and replaying every recent interaction with my mother, trying to uncover some clue that she had been sick, something I shouldn't have missed, some way—even though she was halfway across the globe—that I might have been able to prevent this.
Why hadn't I answered the phone when she called?
Was she calling to tell me she didn't feel well? Did she sense something was wrong? Could I have done anything, told her to go to the hospital before this happened? She was only sixty. She was too young for a heart attack. Something wasn't right.

The next day, Peter called again. I snatched up the phone before the first ring died away.

“How is she?” I snapped, overwhelmed with the impatience of waiting to hear the news.

“She's in a coma,” he said. “It's medically induced, to stabilize her.”

“A coma.” I said it like a statement, trying to process the information.

“But they're going to wake her up,” Peter said, hopefully. “Now that she's stable, they said they can wake her up.”

“I'm sorry, Peter, but I really feel like I need to be there,” I said. It all sounded strange and wrong, and I felt so helpless, a continent away. She would have come to me. I didn't care what he said.

“No, no, it's fine,” he said again. “You have work. Your mom wouldn't want you to miss work. Don't inconvenience yourself. I'll keep you posted. It'll be okay.”

I drove straight to the airport.
Heroes
was just starting the Thanksgiving break, so I had time anyway, but I would have gone no matter what. I would have told them I was done with the show for good, if it would help her. I was going to Amsterdam.

I was calm on the long flight, in that icy all-business way some people get when their world falls apart. I wasn't going to waste time with emotion and tears, not when I had to get there as soon as possible. Get on the plane. Get off. Change planes. Get on. Get off. Everything I did was focused on getting to Amsterdam as fast as I could. I walked with purpose. I went over all the options in my mind. I thought about how I could help her recover. I even thought about moving to Amsterdam for a while. This was my
mother.

Peter met me at the gate, and I was overwhelmed and hopeful when I saw him. I'd spent hours on the plane, torturing myself, turning the little bits of information I had over and over in my mind until I'd exhausted every option. Now, here I was, and here he was, and he would tell me it was all going to be just fine and I would actually be here to see for myself that he was right.

Everything he had said to me had led me to believe things would be okay, and even though I still had a sick feeling that things might be worse than he was letting on, I wrote it off to the language barrier. He was Dutch and English was his second language, so of course I might misinterpret. His literal words had been, “It's fine,” but it was his
tone of voice I couldn't forget—a tone that said, “It's not fine at all.” But what did I know about interpreting his tone? Nothing. I was happy to be in Europe and excited to see my mother because I hadn't seen her in eight months. I couldn't wait to hear all about what had happened from her perspective, as soon as they woke her up. I couldn't wait to nurse her back to health. It was the only scenario I allowed myself to consider.

Peter was a decade or so older than my mother, with a white beard and white hair, a sort of hippie Santa Claus. I smiled and waved and rushed forward. And then I got closer, where I could actually see his face. That's when I knew the news was bad. When I asked him how she was, he just shook his head. “I need to talk to you about this in the car,” he said. He hung his head in defeat, and it was a shot to my heart.

“Okay,” I said. What else could I say? Something in his tone told me not to question him. He put his arm around me and took my suitcase and led me through the airport with such careful tenderness that I thought,
Oh no. He's going to tell me something terrible.
The Amsterdam airport is large and spread out, so we walked for twenty minutes in silence. I understood I had to wait until we got to the car to talk about this, but I wanted to shake him and scream, “Tell me how she is! Tell me!” As we stepped outside, I took a deep breath of the cold, crisp northern European air. I felt better, until we got into the car and Peter broke down in tears.

Through choking sobs, he told me that when the doctors tried to awaken her from the coma, they weren't able to do it. She was non-responsive, and now the doctors wanted to take her off life support because the brain damage was too severe.

I stared at him. The words didn't register. Brain damage? Just yesterday, he had said the words “Everything is going to be okay.” How did “okay” turn into this? I shook my head. I didn't believe him. It couldn't be true. I hadn't talked to her yet. I needed her to tell me
what was going on. I didn't want to hear another word from him. I had come to Amsterdam to deal with a tragedy, with illness, but not with
death.
No, no, not death. Then the anger welled up, along with the tears. My mind thrashed around for someone to blame.

“The medically induced coma? The coma
they
put her in? To
stabilize
her?” I spit out the words. “Did they
cause
the brain damage?” He looked at me miserably and began to cry again, and there we were, an old man and a young woman, a generation apart and not familiar with each other because of the distance, sobbing with grief and anger and frustration in a car in an airport parking lot in Amsterdam, doing nothing to help anyone, just drowning in our mutual grief. We really didn't know each other very well, but suddenly, here we were. We would have to make some big life decisions together in the coming days, so I realized I had to pull myself together. I needed to talk to those doctors. I needed to see my mother. I needed to
wake her up.
She wasn't going to leave me like this. No way.

“Take me to the hospital,” I said.

The drive was an interminable thirty minutes. As I watched the quaint buildings and picturesque canals of Amsterdam fly by, all I could think was that Peter wasn't driving fast enough. I remember him parking the car like it was a hallucination. I remember feeling the door handle and noticing everything with intense clarity—the crunching of my neck from the tension, the cold evening air, the leaves fluttering on the trees. I felt incredibly present. My mother would love to hear about it. Every breath, the beat of my own heart, the hospital's fluorescent lighting, the click of my heels on the linoleum—I remember all of it.

I walked ahead of him down the hall, unstoppable in my quest to get to her room. I couldn't walk fast enough, and it seemed she was still miles away as we went down corridor after corridor, turning left, bending around to the right. I felt like it had suddenly become the
biggest hospital in the world. I couldn't believe my mother had been there for
days,
without me there beside her.

We passed the darkened coffee shop, the closed gift shop, and figures slumped and sleeping in waiting room chairs. I had a feeling of weightlessness. All these people mourning and grieving and anticipating births and deaths. None of it seemed real.

Finally we got into an elevator and went to a new floor where everything became even more sterile. Green walls, snow-white linoleum floors, the smell of alcohol and disinfectant. Then we turned left and we were at her room. She was the first on the right, and there were other patients in the room, and I was shocked and the first thing I thought was,
Why isn't my mother in her own room? Why are other people in my mother's room?
It felt so critical, that she should have her own space where she could be sick, where she could grapple with life and death in her own soul.

Then I really looked at her.

If you have ever been with someone who died, you know what it's like to feel that their spirit is gone. My mother wasn't dead, but she didn't look like herself at all. She looked like a shell, bloated and puffed up with tubes pressing into her skin and going up her nose. She didn't even
resemble
herself. I didn't recognize her. Peter was uncomfortable standing there beside me, probably feeling the waves of my emotions. It was almost too much for me to bear. And then I thought about all the stories I had heard about people who stayed with their loved ones and brought them back to the world after being on life support for months and months, how they suddenly blink their eyes open and suffer from slight amnesia and then come back.

I remember thinking,
I am never taking you off life support, Mom. Never. I don't know whose idea this was and I'd like to lay my hands on them for just one minute because you should not be in this room. You are not going to die. If I have to sit here and hold your hand for a
year to make you understand why you have to live, then that's what I'm going to do.

The next day, I came back early and I read her the Bible for hours and hours. Then I read a children's book she had written for me, called
The Lion and the Horse.
She didn't move. She didn't respond. Her chest rose and fell along with the pumping of the respirator, but she didn't seem to hear me. I wasn't giving up. I told myself she
could
hear me, on some level. I needed her to come back, and I needed to make sure she knew that.

That evening at nine, Nancy rushed into the room. My mother and Nancy had been best friends since the 1970s, when they were both teaching meditation for the Maharishi.

Nancy looked at my mother and then she looked at me. I couldn't find any words, but she could. She immediately began to talk to my mother, as if my mother were fully conscious. She spoke to her as if they were in deep conversation for half an hour. “Lisa, Lisa, you can't do this. Come on, this is not your time. Wake up now.”

The next day, Nancy brought her iPod into the room and put a set of headphones on my mother's ears. She played the Indian Sanskrit chants that they had both loved together for thirty-five years. It was the thread of faith they shared, even though Nancy was Jewish and my mother was Christian. This was their spiritual bond. Then Nancy pressed a tiny Buddha statue into my mother's hand and closed her hand around it until my mother's hand clutched the Buddha herself. Nancy let those chants play for hours and hours, on a loop.

We never left her side. We alternated bathroom breaks and lunch breaks so she was never alone. We huddled close to her, buried into her body, not wanting to let her go. I called my Aunt Laurie in Tennessee every day to update her on the progress and to get her counsel and hear her comforting words. Nancy and I talked and begged and prayed and willed my mother to come back for two days.

Then one afternoon, as I sat on one side of my mother holding her hand and Nancy sat on the other, my mother suddenly sat up and took three huge, deep breaths.

Her mouth started to move as if she were trying to find words to say. Her eyes were unfocused but startled. Nancy and I stared at her. I squeezed her hand.

“Mom?”

She didn't speak, but her body held itself up. It was a miracle. She had come back! I remember thinking,
Of course, we brought her back—the Bible, the chanting, the Buddha, the endless talk. We willed her back. We did it!
But then, she sank back into the pillows. She was gone again.