safe deposit box

it was mid-afternoon on a tuesday. i answered my cell phone and very calmly my dad at the other end said, "i think you need to come now." i drove home to collect some things in a bag, and i remember how absurd it felt as i placed my black funeral dress and heels inside it just in case my brother didn't make it. 4 1/2 hours later i pulled into the parking deck of mission hospital in asheville. my dad called again as i was walking into the lobby and said where to find everyone, that they were all just sitting there in the waiting room on the 4th floor, but he gave no indication that anything was any different than when i spoke to him earlier. the doors of the elevator opened and over the hospital intercom a "code blue" was being called. doctors and nurses were running down the hallway and i almost collided into one as i stepped off. i could also hear the intense wailing and sobbing of someone off in the distance. i rounded the corner and at the end of the hallway i saw my dad trying to hold my stepmother up onto her feet as her weight was crumbling in agony against him towards the floor. i then made the connection that the wailing i'd just heard wasn't a poor stranger's...it was hers...and that the code blue was in my brother's room. his heart had stopped at the same second the bell of the elevator dinged. i froze and then took a step forward to enter a chaos that will never seem any less surreal as long as i live. the sounds accompanying that moment and my body shaking due to my heart pounding with such force will be forever burned in my memory. she was still wailing, "oh God, oh God, no!". my dad released her from his grip long enough so that he could crumble too, and then it was my arms she fell into. with both my bags still on my shoulders all i knew to do was just hold her while she wailed and say "it's OK, it's OK, its OK" over and over like i believed it was going to be. i yelled at my aunt to sit with my dad because his red face and sweat told me that he too may have a heart attack if we didn't calm him. and then just as fast as the chaos had begun, an icu nurse burst through the automatic doors and said they'd gotten josh's heart back to a rhythm. i think my stepmom had wailed out all the energy she had because all she could do was sit wide-eyed and motionless at the news that she hadn't just lost her only son afterall.

the realization that i've become a shell of a person, and that it's no one's fault but my own, sinks like a brick of panic in my gut. i use the word fault loosely, realizing that life just happens, but regardless of that fact no one is responsible for who, or what, i become but me. i don't want to be 45 and wondering where the last twenty years of my life went simply because i was too scared to leap. because i was too afraid to be happy. happy like "my cup runneth over" kind of happy. life is shorter than short; it's sometimes unpredictable and not to be put in some safe deposit box for tomorrows. because what if? what if one day you're not so lucky to just be the one getting out of the elevator?