Today was the first day that I had a physical reaction to the trauma of losing Tommy since I’ve been back in LA. I drove my dad to his doctor’s appointment in the building behind Verdugo Hills Hospital. To get to that building, you have to drive past the entrance of the ER. As I drove past that driveway, I could feel my heart rate rise, my breath shorten and my body start to shake. While I’m writing this, I am sitting in the parking lot behind VHH.
This same parking lot that I sat in so many times waiting for Tommy to come out of his counseling appointments. Sometimes he went willingly and others not. On the days it wasn’t willingly, I’d sit, hoping that he’d get in the car and be willing to talk or at least not be as mad at me as he was when I’d dropped him off for the appointment. Every time was different. Teenage stuff.
But now, I’m sitting behind the same emergency room where I had to leave my baby, not breathing, cold, blue, no blood running through his veins, no heartbeat. The same ER where the nurse told us to wait for the doctor and led us into a small room with a door on either end. Where Tommy’s dad looked at me and said “He’s dead. They wouldn’t have made us wait here if he was still alive. If there was any chance of him making it we would’ve been led in to see him.” The same ER where we had to go in to say our goodbyes. Where we sat with his body trying to understand the depth of what had just happened. As we sat there knowing that our worlds were crumbling. The one place that I never want to go back to as long as I live. Where I never want to re-live the worst day of my life.
That wasn’t the first time that I’d been to this ER with Tommy. When he was a young child, it felt like we came here too often. Usually because he or his brother had croup in the middle of the night and were unable to breathe. I would call my parents in the middle of the night to come and stay with whoever was still asleep if sitting on the front porch wasn’t enough to get them back to normal. Sometimes I’d load up both of them in the middle of the night and head to the ER. When I look back at those years, it’s amazing that I remember anything. It felt like survival much of the time, but I look back with fondness and am grateful to have those memories.
When Tommy was in preschool he stuck some small glow-in-the-dark lego piece up his nose and it was there for 2 weeks before he confessed that it was in there and it was bothering him. We went to VHH ER and they got it out with something that looked like a huge set of tweezers. We laughed many times about that over the years. He loved hearing me tell that story.
Those are the reasons that you expect to go to the ER. The acceptable reasons. The last few months of Tommy’s life, the reasons were different. They were truly life and death. The reasons you never want to experience as a parent. And here I am today, short of breath, trying to suppress the panic that I feel inside. The physical pain of this is real. I feel it in my body. The welling up of tears is just the tip of the iceberg.
Tommy in his preschool days
