I love being a Mom to Moe, but sometimes Moe is a Mom to me.
Especially now.
On Thursday I am having a small surgical procedure at a hospital about 40 minutes from my home. After nearly a year of delays, I’m finally having a lung biopsy to determine the exact nature of a pesky bacterial infection a “sister of tuberculosis” that has taken up residency in my once-upon-a-time, pre-COVID healthy lungs.
Mildly nervous, I admit, even at 69, I still wish my mommy could be here when I wake up from the procedure.
But it is the return to this particular hospital, now proudly part of the NYU Langone system, that weighs on my mind the most.
I am haunted by this hospital and for good reason.
Just walking through those familiar front doors which I did hundreds of times, will transport me back to another time in my life. The cream-colored halls echo with memories and ghosts.
It is a place I once spent weeks at, day, after day, after long day.
It is the hospital where my mother died. From a hospital-acquired infection.
The Last Place
It is the last place I ever heard my mother’s sweet voice, inevitably urging me to leave as it grew late, to go home and take care of my dog Emerson.
It would be the last place I looked into her eyes. Kind-hearted, and deeply empathic eyes. A gorgeous clear blue that belied her age.
It was in that hospital that she looked up at me with pure innocence asking plaintively “Can I have a do-over?” as though she were a camper back at her beloved Rose Lake Camp in 1940 and it was about a softball game and not her life. I whispered that yes, she could, I would make sure she got a do-over. I promised her.
It was the last place I held her hands, stroked her head, and urged her on until it became the place where late one night in the ICU I had to make the agonizing decision to take her off life support.
This was the place where I broke my promise to my mother for a do-over.
It was the last place my mother would tell me she loved me and I would repeat whispering in her ear over and over how much I loved her and then it was the place where for one last and final time I could sit with my mother, hold her still warm, pliable hand after she had died, not wanting to let go, memorizing her face one last time, the years of worry now totally vanished and at peace.
How many times had I walked, raced those halls up and down searching urgently for nurses, an aide, a doctor, or anyone for help.
Only then to go through that all again in that same place for my father a decade later. Improbably in the room next to the one in which my mother died.
The last time I was in that hospital was when I was waiting for the ambulance to take my father to hospice where he would pass away just 24 hours later. But even as he left that place he did it his way with a joke making the nurses and aides smile and laugh which was his skill. And I too laughed even as I cried inside.
I left that hospital that day seven years ago, I thought for the last time.
Lifetimes have passed since then.
So now before I walk through those haunted doors on Thursday I will hold onto Moe who will channel my mother and comfort me. And he will be waiting for me when I get home, even if my mother won’t.
Moe will be there to chase away the ghosts, just as Stanley always did.