Goodbye Is Forever

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed, with an IV in my arm and beeping machines close by. Confused, I looked around me. My husband John was slumped in the chair to my right.

    “Hey honey,” I said, softly.

He looked up.

    “Hey.”

His eyes looked red and puffy like he’d been crying.

    “What do you remember?” he asked me.

    “I remember...” I was suddenly alarmed. “Where’s Lisa?”

He avoided my eyes.

    “She’s... She’s... She’s gone.”

I sank back into the bed. It was like I’d been hit with a ton of bricks.

    “Gone...?” I was thinking, it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

He didn’t respond but instead bowed his head, and I realized he was crying.

    “Where is she?” I was desperately searching for some other explanation for John’s words.

    “In another room.” His voice was trembling uncontrollably. “They said they’d wait for you to wake up so we could say-” his voice broke as he choked on his words. “So we could say goodbye together.”

Later, John and I were in another room similar to the one I had been in. As we walked in, we clutched each other’s hand tightly.

There she was. So still, so perfect, with her little two-year-old eyes closed. She looked so adorable, so small, so peaceful. It was just the way she looked when she slept.

She’s not gone, I thought. She’s right here, and she’ll wake up and rub her eyes and say she’s hungry.

But I could also see that she was hooked up to machines, and that those machines were the only things keeping her in this world.

I felt my heart break into a thousand pieces. I finally understood that what I was seeing before me was just my daughter’s shell. The inside - where all of who she really was, and would have become, had once been - was no longer there.

We stood over her for a minute. John could not stop crying. But I was dry-eyed because part of me could still not believe that she was really gone.

    “Are you ready?” John asked.

I took a deep breath.

    “Yes.”

We each put a hand on the cord. I was still thinking that this was only some horrible nightmare that I would wake up from.

My hand was shaking. I pulled the plug.

I did not wake up. Instead, I got the mechanical sound of the machines turning off.

And then I knew: I wasn’t going to wake up, and neither was Lisa. Because this was real. This was the final goodbye, and it was John and I saying goodbye to her, rather than the other way around.

It was only then that my eyes filled with tears.