Love is a chair
"Hospital waiting rooms," I told my brother, "are one of the top three places to read trashy novels."
"What are the other two?" he asked.
"In bed when you're sick," I said, pulling a stack of paperbacks out of my tote bag, "and on airplanes. But hospitals are number one. Hospitals are no place for serious literature."
Hospitals are no place for our robustly healthy father, either, but some malevolent gene or faulty biological switch decided otherwise. Thursday, as I read chicklit and my brother paged through the latest Robert B. Parker mystery, surgeons at the University of Minnesota Medical Center removed a golf-ball-sized tumor from his occipital lobe.
Adding irony to injury: Ten years ago, nearly to the day, Dad was sitting at his wife's bedside in the same hospital. My stepmother, stricken with one of the deadliest forms of leukemia, spent months in the oncology unit receiving chemotherapy, radiation, and eventually a bone marrow transplant. Day after day, night after night, week after week, she fought the cancer in her blood while Dad sat vigil and slept in that hospital chair. He wouldn't leave. When asked to go out to dinner or take a break, his answer was always the same: "She can't leave."
It was the simplest and most profound statement of love I've ever heard.
Now he's the one in the hospital bed, she at his side. What are the chances? I can't decide whether Fate is a bitch for letting lightning strike twice, or benevolent for letting her live to take her turn in that bedside chair. I can only hope that Dad shares her talent for beating the odds.
I know this much, though: Love is a chair.
Love is being there.
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