Whew! We made it! The one year mark.
That's what we are supposed to say right? That somehow we have crawled to the other side of the 365 days since Chelsea was taken from us and now it will be easier? To me I look at it as: "Good lord, now I have to make it through the next 65 or so years?!" It seems perilous, to say the least.
While my sister was so much more than her death, I wrote this in hopes of the beginning of an explanation of the extraordinary pain that we carry throughout our lives. Chelsea is THE MOST AMAZING person that I have had the pleasure of knowing, in all of her glory, obnoxiousness, and glory for life. I wrote this segment only about a month after her passing because I wanted, for reasons only I can understand, to remember exactly how it happened that our lives became what they have and why this year has been one of learning. This is an account of the events as they occurred through my eyes, from one year ago.
March 3rd, 2012:
I hadn't been asleep long. The pounding of the rain from the lurking mass of storms that
had come to the area had lulled me to sleep only a few hours before and was
apparently exhausted. Surprisingly, it wasn't the enormous cracks of thunder
that woke me up, it was my frantic husband. I had been so gloriously submerged
in sleep that when he shook me awake it took about five precious minutes for me
to come around and hear what he was saying. Honey, I just woke up! Give me a
sec! About that same time, my phone started ringing. As I reached for it
with very little grasp or clarity, I knew, immediately, what my husband was
telling me and I sprang to life. I answered the phone and told my baby brother
to pick me up in the driveway, that I would be ready in just a minute.
The
convenience of living near family never seemed more certain than in that
moment. I knew I had very little time to get ready, because of Vince’s extreme
speed in a vehicle and the fact that he lived in my step-dad’s house only a
mere quarter of a mile down the hill from my own home. So I changed clothes in
a flash, brushed my teeth, splashed some water on my face, grabbed my purse and
my makeup bag (?) and headed for the driveway, where as I had suspected,
Vince’s dark green Jeep sat waiting. So, donning a pair of mismatched socks and
the ugliest pair of boots, I sprinted through the downpour of rain to his
Jeep. During the long ride through what
can only be described as extreme flooding, I made a few phone calls trying to
get an update on Chelsea’s status. I mercilessly woke several people up in the
wee hours of the morning as Vince crashed his Jeep over and over again into the
waves of water beginning to flood the roads. At about six minutes to our
arrival, I distinctively recall talking to my step-dad, Chelsea’s dad, who had
arrived at Northeast Georgia Medical Center hours earlier, after a late Friday
night visit from the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s office. In all of the
conversations that I had in route that evening, his was the one, and perhaps
the only, conversation that I remember having.
At about four minutes out, I asked how she was doing and all he was able
to tell me was that she was not doing well. What do you mean, not well? What
does that mean? He told me that they were getting ready to give her last
rites, which I quickly dismissed as some sort of cruel joke. This was, after
all, the Kiessling family, notorious for all of their pranks. Minutes later,
Vince flung the car into the hospital parking lot. As I unbuckled my seat belt,
ready to spring from the car, Vince debated on whether it would be appropriate
to park in one of the eight handicap spots that, I might add, were considerably
closer to the entrance to the emergency room. I’m pretty sure my exact words
were, “Fuck it, it’s two in the morning and this is an emergency.” He
whipped the car into the spot and we bounded for the top of the stairs.
Now, if you
have ever experienced a trip to the emergency room after a call in the middle
of the night, you know what I mean when I say that a rush of emotions comes over
you as you near the ER doors. Like the distinct smell of chance comes over you
and every possible feeling that you could ever feel comes rushing over you in
waves and little pin pricks all over your skin.
I had barely stepped through the first of two sliding glass
doors that barred the rest of the world from the tragedies and miracles that
occurred inside the ER walls when I locked eyes with my step-dad coming outside
through the other set of glass doors. Just breathe, she is fine. He had
an entourage surrounding him, or more like lurking under him because of his
massive stature, but I barely noticed. The only thing that occurred to me was
that he looked surprisingly calm, which brought to me a sense of tranquility
and the urgent need to find out what was going on. Before I could even get a
good running start toward him, I felt a jerk on my arm, like a force field
holding me back from everything I dreaded.
I quickly looked and dismissed the women who seemed to have appeared out
of nowhere and who was now holding my arm and talking about who she was. As
if I care, lady. I have some serious things going on right now. In an
effort to wash away the conversation that had taken place between my step-dad
and I not eight minutes before, I asked how Chelsea was doing. It was then that
I saw the greatest flash of pain come across his face and I knew. Even though
it was difficult for him to convey it, I knew before he had a chance to allow
the words to escape his lips that our lives had now been flipped upside down
and inside out; that nothing would ever be the same.
I had the
most intense surge of so many emotions; it was so intense and painful that I
collapsed on the floor right there in the entrance to Northeast Georgia Medical
Center Emergency Room. I couldn't cry hard enough or yell out loud enough,
nothing I did seemed to come close to expressing the tremendous, crushing,
searing pain that I felt in that moment. For anyone who has never lost someone
extremely close to you, it would be nearly impossible to describe the
mind-shattering, blinding ache that takes over your body; it is as though
someone has just ripped your heart from your body and your soul from your mind
and all that is left of you is a hollow, empty shell of what you once were. I
mean, how do you ask someone to steady themselves and come back to reality when
they have no heart and soul?
I am not
sure exactly how long I stayed, knees buckled, on that grimy floor, but one of
my step-dad’s entourage was finally able to either convince me to stand or
picked me up. He introduced himself to me as Chaplain Ralph, the on-call
Chaplain for the hospital that evening. Lucky him. He stood in front of me and tried explaining
what was going on and what had happened, but I wasn’t really listening. If I
had been anywhere close to being my human self at that moment, I would have
compared him to the teacher from the Charlie Brown cartoons. Wha wha wha
wha. I looked past him and started glancing around frantically. Where is
Vince? I know he had been here a moment ago; I hugged him at some point. I
looked outside the glass doors that just a few moments ago I had been fighting
with all my might to get into, and now wanted nothing more than to get out from
behind their cold grasps. I spotted my brother leaning over a trash can outside
the first set of doors, heaving with all that he had. The news had made him
physically ill. My step-dad stood behind him staring off into the parking lot
and the dimly lit streets beyond, as if trying to find the answers out there in
the stormy night.
I stepped
away from Chaplain Ralph and the arm-grabbing lady, whom I found out was the
social worker on call that night, and slowly stepped out the doors to join my
puking brother and overwhelmed step-dad. I am pretty sure the good Chaplain was
mid-sentence when I decided to rudely walk away, but I didn't care much for
anything anyone had to say at that point. Whoosh. A strong gust of wind
blew down and into my face as I stepped through the sliding glass doors and out
to the covered drop-off area where my diminished family stood in shambles. I
checked on Vince first. I’m fine. Then I walked to Dan, puffing on a
cigarette. With nothing else to say or do or even think, we just stood there. I wasn't sure if it was the way the dingy light of the
hospital overhang hit his face or the enormous amount of hurt he wore on it,
but at that moment, my step-dad looked like he had aged 20 years since I had
last seen him. . So there we stood, in silence, staring off into the abyss of night, wondering how we
all came to be right here, right now. No one seemed to have the answer to that
question and no one seemed tremendously worried about it in that moment. All we
seemed to know was that Chelsea was gone and we were still here, left to
somehow pick up the shattered pieces of our lives and carry each other through
this.
While we stood there killing ourselves and not really caring
much, stunned and still trying to bounce the shock off of each other, the
Chaplain reemerged from inside the emergency room. He quietly notified us that
they had cleaned up her body and that if Vince and I were ready, we could go
see her. Moment of truth. We glanced
at each other and then back to the Chaplain. Without any words, the three of us
walked in through the ER, where it seemed that as soon as we stepped through
the front doors, the entire department slowed to a screeching halt. I have been
on the other side of this standoff, between the untouched staff and the
grieving family, this was, in fact the very ER that I spent two years of
clinical training in. I had seen the family grieving the teenage overdose
victim, a family in hysterics over their three year old family member that had
drowned in a neighbor’s pool, and I had even seen the family in sobs over a
loved one lost in a car accident. I guess, on that side of the lines, you think
of how safe you are in your world, that something so tragic could never
possibly happen to you. How wrong I had
been.
Lead by the Chaplain, Vince and I stepped beyond the doors of Trauma
room A1, the room that they put the serious conditions, or, in our case, the
unrecoverable. I am not sure what I expected to see when we crossed the divide
from the brightly lit emergency room ‘pit’ to the quiet sanctuary of A1, but a
dimly lit room and a group of melancholy staff lining the walls surrounding the
room was not it. My eyes went immediately to the bed in the middle of the room,
the floor surrounding it littered with gloves, bandages, tubing, and wrappers
from the valiant effort to save her life. There she lay, as if she was sleeping,
except for the intubator tube down her throat, I might have thought she was. I
crossed the room and without even thinking grabbed her hand, as if a gentle
squeeze would wake her up. Her face, upon closer inspection, was a little
swollen and extremely bruised across the bridge of her nose and under her eyes
and besides the stitches running across the top of her forehead, she was just
as I had always remembered her, lovely. I stroked her hair, called her name,
and turned to leave. It was at this time that I noticed Dan had followed us
into the room and now stood sobbing in the corner. We stood there hugging until
Vince had said goodbye and came to join in. We all quickly escaped the morbid
room and it was at that time that I realized that this would be the last time
that I would ever see my sister’s face in person, and the weeping began again.
The next few hours were spent calling family, or at least the
ones that we felt needed to be awakened at that early hour of the morning, and
giving them the impossibly grave news. With each person, we would relive the
whole tragic story over and over again. My sister-in-law, my maternal
grandmother, Dan’s sisters and his mother, my older brother, Garrett, my
husband – each time, I grew a little number and little emptier. It was decided,
by hospital staff and among ourselves that our mom and our older brother, who
were currently in route from Savannah, a five-and-a-half to six hour drive
away, would be left in the dark about Chelsea’s loss until they arrived. We
would let them continue to think what they would about Chelsea’s condition
after the car accident. While a lot of back and forth criticisms came and went
from this decision, I still feel that we chose the best course of action for
our circumstances. It wouldn't have done either of them any good to know the
truth. It wasn't like they could close the distance between them and the
hospital any faster with that knowledge. I actually kind of envied them for
being spared the extra few hours of agony that we had to endure. Especially
after the escalating amount of suffering that ensued after the arrival of
Chelsea’s paternal grandmother and the retelling of a story I no longer wished
to play a part in.
When a loved
one dies in the emergency room at the hospital, your family becomes a threat.
You are now a special circumstance and a telling sign of how the hospital has
“failed.” The incessant crying and hysterics are looked at with stunned looks
and muffled comments, as though you are a cold and you might spread if left to
mingle with the people who are still whole. So some social worker or
psychiatrist suggested that they tuck these grieving families away, segregated
from the other families and masses of people who were not there because of the
death of a loved one. Enter the
‘Insanity Room’. That isn't really what they call it. Hospital administration
and staff call it the Quiet Room, but to anyone that has had to spend even just
a few brief moments in that room would know that it is anything but quiet. You
can hear the sniffles, cries, and even thoughts of all of the members of your
family. There are no secrets kept within those walls. The most horrible part of
that room, and perhaps the loudest, is the sound of your own thoughts. They are
so loud and pronounced in that room, there is no escaping your own mind, there
is nothing to distract you from having to think your thoughts and allowing the
events of the evening wash over you. Even better than that is when they put the
family members that slowly trickle in through the night piled in as well. With
every chair facing the one on the opposite side of the room, you have no choice
but to stare at your sobbing grandmother, or bewildered cousin, or a pleading
aunt, until you feel like you are not going to be able to take it anymore,
until you are, quite literally, insane.
After hours of moving around the ‘public’ waiting room, a
trip to Walgreens, twelve cups of the strongest rocket fuel I have ever had,
and about fourteen subsequent trips to the bathroom, the time for mom to arrive
was almost upon us. I had been tracking their movements across the state with
my older brother via text throughout the night and by his calculations they
should have been getting close. I guess it was around 6:15 am when I sent
another text to see where they were when he sent that they were in the
hospital. I quickly picked up the phone and dialed him. Where are you at? He repeated his text. They were here. The phones started to crackle and his voice began
to fade, like some sort of cruel joke determined to make this evening this most
difficult of my life. When his voice came back, loud and clear, over the phone
he told me that they were stepping out of an elevator into the CCU, or the
Critical Care Unit, of the hospital. Garrett,
why are you guys in the CCU? He was obviously confused. You guys are supposed to come to the
Emergency Room. They had assumed that that is where they would take her
after she was stabilized. Oh my God, they
think she is still alive. In all of our scheming to get them up to North
Georgia safely, no one thought about this moment of the plan, the moment when
we would have to give a bit of our secret and possibly secret in its
entirety….over the phone…from another department of the hospital. Garrett said
that he didn't understand but that he would get directions to the ER and they
would be down shortly. When I got off the phone, I turned to Vince and covered
my mouth, in complete disgust in myself. How could I have been so careless? I
had told them to come to the hospital, but I didn't tell them where in the
hospital. So, my poor mother and older brother were wondering the hospital at
that very moment with the false hope that Chelsea was alive somewhere. It was
at that moment, standing at the entrance to the department, staring down the
hallway that lead to check-in, that we all turned to the sound of my mother’s
voice. She rounded the corner, both of them wearing grins on their faces and
scolding themselves for taking so long to get there. My mom looked at the wall
of solemn faces staring back at her and joyfully asked where Chelsea was and
the status of her condition. No one answered. She asked again. Still nothing. Someone has got to say something. I
stepped forward, away from the shocked and pitying faces of my relatives, and
shook my head. I knew what I wanted to say. Chelsea didn't make it, mom, she is gone. The words just wouldn't come out, so I
stood there shaking my head and then Dan and Vince quickly began doing the same.
It was only when the look on my mother’s face turned from joy and concern to
despair and anger that I realized the words stuck in my throat. She didn't make it. I stepped towards
her and tried to wrap my arms around her but she grabbed my shoulders and began
shaking me, as if she could somehow change the ending. As if I were a magic 8
ball and she didn't like the prediction that it was giving to her and by
shaking it she could wash that ending away for another. No, mom, she is dead, she died. She collapsed into the floor, in
almost the very spot that I had collapsed about four and a half hours earlier. The
swarm of relatives, Chaplain, and social workers were upon her in a flash. I
stepped away and followed my distraught brothers out to the overhang. It had
gotten chilly overnight and I hadn't even realized it. As we stood there, in
the icy wind that the storms had brought in behind them, I thought to myself
how different my life had been a mere seven hours earlier and how I badly
wanted to return to that time.
Someone once asked me when I feel that I will be healed in some sense of the word. I answered them as candidly as I could. When I can think of Chelsea and not remember the feeling of the night that she died and the vivid image of her lying dead in exam room A1, I will feel healed. When I say Chelsea's name and the first thing that comes to my mind are not of the series of events from the night that she died and instead those of our childhood, I will feel healed. When I think of Chelsea and hear her laughter instead of my own tears, I will be healed. I don't know when that will be, if ever, but I look forward to it.
Perhaps the more important thing is that I do remember her.
Happy 1 year Heaven birthday, Chelsea!
