"What a nice room." A private room, with a couch and vertical blinds over a slider door that went out to a patio. Stenciled vines painted just under the ceiling. I've been in worse hotels. A lot worse hotels.
"It's the Hospice room." Verna pulled the blanket over her legs. I couldn't help but notice when I walked in. There was a bruise high on her hip, purple and blue like an Iris. It stopped at her knee.
"It's a private room, Mother." My wife put down the bag she was carrying. "It's sunny, and you're lucky because it was the only room they had." It had been a long night. Verna had fallen on the ice. Her neighbor called us right after she called for an ambulance. They were afraid she had broken her hip. She didn't break anything.
"There might be hairline fractures." Verna remembered only the bits and terrible pieces that made this a major event. Not that it wasn't a major event. It's just that instead of being relieved that her hip wasn't crumbling, in need of being replaced, and all the physical therapy that would go along with it, she heard "hairline fractures" and envisioned them to be like windshield cracks. "They'll know pretty soon how bad they are."
"Mom, the Doctor said, 'might be'." My wife, her mother, a mythical story.
"I'm in the Hospice room." A moment before she had been watching Oprah on the television. She should have been in the "not really sure why you're here" room. "Do you think I'm going to die?"
"Mom!" I was two steps from my wife, 14 from the door. I stopped pulling things from the bag and hoped neither of them noticed me."
"Uliv, can you... can you help with this?" My shirt must have clashed with the serenity of the stenciling. How else did they see me?
"Well... it's only a Hospice room when someone is dying. So, right now, it's a "precautionary observation sleep over room." I thought that would help. It wasn't helping. "Verna, you're not dying. At least, you're not dying in the "imminent" sense of the word. Everyone's dying, but few of us are dying right now." Still not helping. "When you're going to die you'll be ready to die, like that Twilight Zone episode with Robert Redford. You won't be afraid. You won't worry if your children are going to be all right. You won't think anything of leaving your friends. You'll be living in a world you don't know any longer. Until then, you're going to be fine."
"Honey, did you bring her books from the car?"