My feet moved methodically down the sterile hospital corridor. The scent of alcohol forced its way up my nose and into my head, doing its job in cleansing my mind of all thought. The smell was unnervingly familiar; it was the smell of lost hope, of last resorts, of pain, of fear. I stopped in front of the bare metal door, meant to shut out the rest of the world in the hope for recovery, for life.
Before my hand turned the knob, I pushed back all of my emotion and fixed my face with a skin-deep smile that would be erased from my lips soon after leaving. A creak followed the turning of the knob. Tears threatened my eyes when they fell upon the pitiful sight that dominated the room.
My little girl lay in the bed, swallowed by the sheets and pillows. Her face was sunken and tired, skin like a ghost. The wisps of midnight hair she still possessed fluttered by her small face like butterflies, comforting. Lies. Everything she was told were lies, precious morsels of fantasy, fed to her by hopeless doctors. Appeasing her with empty hopes and hollow dreams.
Her eyes flutter open at the sound of my feet and a smile tries to pull its way up at the edges of her mouth. The sight of her eyes helped to push away some of the ice that enclosed my heart. The only part of my little princess that resided still, within the corpse: large green orbs protruding from the drawn skin. They were filled with pain and suffering, too much for a child. I could see the hope and happiness trying to push through the pain, the reality.
Walking forward I wrapped my arms gently around her frail body that felt ready to break at the slightest touch. Both careful, as always, not to disturb all the tubes and needles sustaining life, prolonging suffering.
“Hey princess,” I whispered to her and placed a tender kiss on her forehead, filled with all the love and warmth words could never say. She smiled the smile of the young. I had always loved how children smiled: always full of warmth, of innocence, of hope. Everything that evaporated with age and experience, everything I no longer had. It pained me to see how believing she was of every fabrication meant to placate and soothe. The yearning in her eyes for a life, all her own.
“Hi mommy,” she said. Her voice soft golden honey laced with the poison that was slowly tearing her apart, piece by piece until there would be nothing left but a memory.
“How are you today, baby?” I asked while pulling a chair, quietly, up next to her bed.
“I'm doing better!” She tried to exclaim, but her voice broke and she dissolved into racking coughs that made her shake and her chest heave. Soft pink color flushed her cheeks. “The doctor said that I was getting better,” she said again, reducing her voice to a, now hoarse, whisper.
“That’s great,” I said, trying to smile through my burning eyes. The dam holding back the flow of tears was wearing and my composure was slipping. But I hung on, for my princess. “I brought a book,” I told her, pulling Rapunzel out of my handbag and propping it on my knee.
I was rewarded with shining eyes and an almost smile. I helped her to sit up more against her pillows, just enough to see the pictures and to hear my words more clearly.
I began the story with the routine “once upon a time…” The pages turned with soft rustles that accompanied the ever present beep of machines, indicating that she was still clinging to the life she had barely had a taste of. This became unnoticeable background music that blended into the constant sounds and noises of the hospital, and the ominous silence of death. I looked over at my princess just as the night was riding up toward the castle intent upon saving Rapunzel from her horrific fate, to see her eyes close and her uneven breathing slow. I closed the book and slipped it away, out of sight.
The silence pressed down upon me, unnerving, suffocating. I could not fathom why the silence had become so menacing, why the air tasted of the very essence of fear. Suddenly the answer I had been groping for, that had floated just above my reach, landed upon my consciousness. The beeping had stopped. The machine that pointed to life, even when there was so little still there, had gone silent.
I sat in my chair, waiting like a child for someone to tell me it was a bad dream, that the essence of my existence was not, at that very moment, lying still on the bed never to move again. The eyes now glazed over and life-less would never twinkle with hope and love, that the smile, now small and contented upon that perfect face would never be turned toward me, or anyone, ever again.
Doctors and nurses rushed forward into the room, only to proclaim the obvious, there was nothing to do. That is what hope does to you, it is a cruel monster of deceit and lies, telling you it may be alright, it may work in the end, but it never does. It only brings down the walls faster, brings the tears quicker, and makes victory impossible. I had not realized until that moment that the monster had taken a small residence in me. The attack on my fortress had won and the tears came, along with the biting scratching, unbearable grief. So I did what I had done the last time. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I kissed my princess, one last time.
And as I sat stricken with grief, a voice floated into my head, sweet like the purest golden honey,
“I'm with the angels, mommy.” Then like a butterfly, the voice and the presence floated away, on its first flight, first light.
