What It Means to Sit With Someone You Love

Time is strange in the hospital.
It stretches thin.
It snaps back.
It puddles.

You wait.
You watch.
You try to read meaning into numbers on a screen you don’t understand.

A code is called over the intercom and my body goes rigid.
Even when it isn’t her room.
Even when I know it probably isn’t her room.

This is the place my father died.

During Covid, the halls were silent.
Masked faces.
The loneliness of it.
Like the building itself was holding its breath.

Now it’s loud again.
Visitors.
Flowers.
Carts.
Lunch bags swinging from wrists.

Life everywhere.

Except in this one room where everything feels fragile and suspended.

My mama is ninety.
Ninety.

I say the number and it sounds like it belongs to someone else’s mother.

It’s one thing to break bones when you’re twenty.
It’s another to break them when you’ve lived nearly a century
and the man you loved most has already gone somewhere you cannot follow yet.

I know people don’t live forever.
I know ninety is a gift.

But I am fifty-eight.
Her youngest grandson is twenty-four.

We are not done asking her questions.

She was born in 1936.

When she tells stories, it’s like she is describing another planet.

War rationing.
Yellow ribbons on trees.
Blue star flags in windows.
One star.
Two stars.
Three.

I try to picture being a child and walking past those houses.
Knowing someone from inside might not come back.

She tells me about Thurman Brown.
About his parents.
Pressed suits.
His mother’s matching jackets and hats.

They owned The Sepia Club on Spring Street.

I looked it up while sitting here in this chair.

It was a jazz club.
Black musicians stopped there on their way to Idlewild.

Music.
In Muskegon.
On Spring Street.

It’s gone now.

Demolished.

That word hit me harder than I expected.

Demolished.

Like something vibrant and full and alive can just… be erased.

My mom was a little girl sitting in that world, drinking iced tea in a house connected to that club.

And then her mother said,

“You probably shouldn’t go into Thurman’s house anymore.”

That was it.

History landing in one sentence.

I look at her now.

Her hands twisted like old orchard branches.

These hands have done everything.

Five children.
Ten grandchildren.
Twelve great grandchildren.

Twelve.

Do you know what it means to live long enough to see your children’s children’s children?

She has seen the world rearrange itself over and over.

Before birth control.
Before women could get credit.
Before girls’ sports mattered.

She ran track anyway.
Played baseball anyway.

When my turn came, she pushed me forward.

Try it.
Go.
Run harder.

I wonder how much of my own drive is just her unfinished longing moving through me.

She was in her twenties when MLK was killed.
When JFK was killed.

She has watched segregation crack open.
Watched language change.
Watched shame become conversation.

She moved from radio to television to smartphones.
From paper maps to GPS.
From long distance calls you had to schedule
to FaceTime from a hospital bed.

And here she is.

Asking the nurse to wipe the smudge off the window.
Telling her granddaughter how to fix the banana cake so the center cooks through.

Still noticing.
Still teaching.
Still particular.

I sit here and feel the ache of it.

Of buildings being demolished.
Of eras disappearing.
Of my father gone.
Of my mother’s bones breaking at ninety.

Change comes whether we want it or not.

The Sepia Club is gone.
Idlewild is quieter.
The blue star flags are history.
My father is gone.

And one day — I know — she will be too.

I don’t want that sentence to be true.

But I can feel the edge of it in this room.

And still.

She is here.

Breathing.

Her life is not a paragraph in a textbook.

It is five children.
Ten grandchildren.
Twelve great grandchildren.

It is iced tea.
Pressed suits.
Jazz on Spring Street.
Ice chipped off a driveway.
Quilts.
Banana cake.

It is ninety years of watching the world change
and standing up inside it anyway.

I sit beside her and feel both things at once:

The ache.
And the necessity.

Nothing stays.

Not buildings.
Not eras.
Not even the strongest woman I know.

But right now,

she is still here.

And I am watching.

If you enjoyed this post, join my inner circle of people on a mission to design a life they don’t need to escape from!