A new kind of hope

Just 40-something days after I moved to Virginia I drove to Knoxville, Tennessee, to be with my mother following emergency open heart surgery. I held her bloated hand and noticed for the thousandth time how my hands are so like hers, which were so like her father's.

I'd always hated my "football" hands, chubby and stumpy with peely fingernails and wrinkled knuckles. Michelle was graced with the slender Gibson fingers of a model. I got the hands of a coal miner's daughter. 

But holding Mom's swollen hand, bruised from IV sticks and needle pricks, I was so proud to have that little bit of her in me. I told her as much, though she couldn't answer. A ventilator tube snaked out of her mouth. Her eyes were closed as she struggled to just live. 

Two days later I headed out of Volunteer town to Nashville. A helicopter was flying Mom to Vanderbilt where some of the best pulmonary doctors in our nation were waiting for her. I didn't think of how scary the interstates were or how much I hated driving at high speeds. I just drove. I sang along to my Passion CD on iTunes and drove. The irony of how much she feared flying didn't escape me, and I was thankful that she, at the very least, didn't have to know she was zooming through the air minutes ahead of me.

The next five days were a lesson in patience, trust, and faith. 

Romans 12:12 - Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

I did find some rays of joy. Mom smiled at me - a few times - when I got right in her face, her brown eyes open and alert for just a moment, she really smiled around her vent tube. Her nurses at Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Cardiac ICU made me smile, too. These amazing men and women, gifted with the ability to care for both critical patients and their fragile families, treated her with great respect and even love. They never gave me false hope, but they never let me lose hope. There's joy in nursing, as Mom showed me so many times. I told her over and over how much she would have loved her very own personal nurses.

I found patience at Mom's bedside when there was no news. No healing. No miracle. Only minute after minute of sitting, talking to Mom and trying to hide my cries. Just holding her hand, pleading for prayer on Facebook and trying to keep up with lesson plans via email. A break in the day to head down five floors and speed walk to the cafeteria for lunch. Comfort in a BLT, Diet Coke, and vanilla pudding cup. Then more waiting till it was time to go home to the hotel where I'd wait some more, praying that my phone wouldn't ring.

I found faith in prayer. Oh, how I prayed. Eyes wide open prayers. Eyes sealed shut and dripping with salty tears prayers. Collective prayers as family and friends joined in lifting Mom up to God. Prayers for healing, but really for God to do as He saw best. Deep down, I think I knew. 

And then on Thursday, when her left eye no longer responded to the flash of a light, and the doctors said her brain had suffered a hemorrhage, and her right ventricle was simply beat, I was advised to make the call. To keep her alive on machines? Or to let her go? I had prayed. I had kept the faith. I knew the joy she would find, even if I was far from joyous. It was time. Mom was telling us she was ready to go home.

And so she did. 

I held her hand. I cried over it, and I rubbed those stumpy fingers so like my own. I told her to go. We'd be OK. I kissed her cheek and watched her chest fail to move. I laid my head on her shoulder and just cried. And yet, I also knew a peace like no other. Mom was with Jesus. She was with Michelle. She was home. And one day I'd be there with her.

That's the joy, I guess. The joy of knowing it's not over. It's not finished here. It's finished there. And there is where my hope is. 

A handmade card from one of my 2nd graders