Mama G.

It rained all morning. I woke up to my plants tipping over from the wind, but how was I in such a good mood? I hummed as I repotted my basil, watered my cilantro saplings, and made a sturdier base for my aloe. I cooked a delicious lunch and watched a movie. I hadn’t looked at my phone for two hours, content with dirt under my fingernails and a bellyful of avocado. Too distracted, too solid, too removed to notice that my phone had been ringing frantically.

I had woken up feeling like this once in 2016, driven with energy and purpose—a rare thing. A few hours later, I had received news that my grandmother had been intubated, and a few hours after that, I had listened on the phone as she was pronounced dead, my hurriedly-packed suitcase falling apart as I had collapsed in my best friend’s arms.

I opened my phone, finally, to look for instructions on planting cilantro. I had too many text messages and phone calls—having lived across the ocean from my family for so long, I braced myself.

They were all from people I knew at work. I opened one in random order, from one of my nurse friends. “The skies are crying with us,” it had said.

That’s how I found out.

It was different this time. Nobody was with me or holding me, and I wasn’t sobbing. I was sitting at my window, staring blankly at the cilantro that I had just dropped on the floor.

I had been told once that ER docs dissociate too well. That we know how to express what we think we should be feeling, without feeling any of it.

Some of these messages say, I knew you were close to her. Call me if you need to talk. Some of them tell me that they are crying at home, that if I want company while I do the same, they’re here for me. One of them read, why Guia? Why her?

Except I feel nothing. I see nothing, despite the color of my plants and the gray rain staring back at me, unmoving, unchanging.

I hear something, faintly. I hear somebody offering me dried mango. I whip my head around. Nobody is here. That same voice says, Dr. DEE-SAAI, LINE SIXTEEN piercingly, painfully, but softly? How?

Guia’s face is clear, so sharp that she could be standing right here in this room with me. I can switch between her different faces rapidly—how tired she would look on the first night shift in a string of five; how counterintuitively energetic she would look on her last one. How she looked when she was irritated, and how she looked when she was pretending to be irritated, a grin quivering immediately beneath her glasses. How she looked when she knew she had been too hard on somebody but was too proud to apologize (so she’d feed them instead). How she looked when she had said to me, I told Dr. Rinnert that I am very impressed with your class, you are wonderful children. How she laughed at me when I had responded unabashedly with, Guia, are you drunk? How proudly she had said, she’s just like me! after having heard me aggressively advocate for a patient on the phone.

How she had looked when she hugged me a few weeks before she died, saying, you are my crazy child.

I shift a little in my chair, still staring outside. If I don’t move, maybe time won’t move. Maybe nothing will change. Maybe I can crystallize this moment, let it fossilize, remain. If I keep my bedroom door closed, I won’t let time in.

Then, I stand up. I open my window. I open my door. Not because I’ve suddenly accepted the news or reached a catharsis. I move, because I’m told to, because I hear it clearly: WHAT is wrong with you DEE-SAA-I?