We were, for five years, a family that worked.
And then Emily got sick.
It was a Tuesday.
It is always, in these stories, an ordinary day. That is one of the things nobody tells you about the worst days of your life — they don’t arrive with a different quality of light, they don’t give you a warning in the texture of the morning. The day Emily got sick was a Tuesday in March with ordinary gray clouds and ordinary school lunch boxes and the ordinary argument about whose turn it was to sit in the front seat, which was actually nobody’s turn because they were both five and couldn’t sit in the front seat, a fact they contested energetically every morning.
She had a headache at breakfast. Children get headaches. I gave her children’s Tylenol and sent them both to school and thought nothing of it in the way that you think nothing of the things that are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nothing.
The school called at eleven-thirty.
Emily had collapsed in the classroom.
The next four hours are not something I can give you linearly, because they did not happen linearly. They happened in fragments — the drive to the hospital, which I do not remember, the waiting room, which I remember in too much detail, the quality of fluorescent light and the specific smell of that room and the other families in it who were waiting for their own fragments, the doctor coming out.
His face before he spoke.
That face.
I have never seen a more eloquent human face than the face of a doctor who is about to tell a parent that they need to sit down.
Emily had an undetected congenital defect. A weakness in the wall of a blood vessel in her brain, present since before she was born, invisible on the standard screenings, unknown to anyone. It had held for five years and three months. On that Tuesday in March it stopped holding.
She was gone before I reached the hospital.
I did not get to say goodbye.
That is the part I have never been able to put down. Not that she died — though the loss of her was a wound I have lived with every day since. But that I did not get to say goodbye. That the last thing I said to her was something about seat belts, and she had rolled her eyes in the theatrical way she had recently discovered, and that was the last moment. No knowing. No preparation. Just the ordinary end of an ordinary morning and then a doctor’s face and then the rest of my life.
