Waiting For The Bus.




I don’t mind sleeping through the night, or not getting the medicine together twice a day, or mixing and weighing his formula recipe.  I don’t miss having songs by the Wiggles or Barney stuck in my head for hours, or the endless laundry.  Most of the trappings of having a special needs child have fallen to the wayside in these past sixteen months—except, it seems, for one. 

Since Isaac was almost four, we would wake up, make coffee, get the medicine and formula together while the coffee was brewing, take the coffee and the medicine into his room, give him his medicine, sip the coffee, get him dressed, load up his chair with all that he would need for the day, take another sip, load him into his chair, find him a movie to watch or maybe just bring him into the kitchen, then the short wait for the bus to pull up in the alley, load him up and in and he was gone.  I would walk back up the ramp and sit at the table.—One boy off to school, the other who didn’t yet need to be woken up— and El and I would wait in the kitchen, coffee cups in hand, reading the paper, or on our phones, or having a conversation—like a button was pressed, or a bell had rung, and we were just remembering to breathe, waiting for the next round to begin. 

Sixteen months later we still wait for the bus to pull up in our alley.  Of course it doesn’t.  There is no bus and hasn’t been one since January 19th, 2015.  But we get up early anyway, El takes a shower, I make coffee, and then we wait.  We wait longer these days…stretching what used to be ten or fifteen minutes into something closer to twenty, or even twenty-five.  

Before we had children, mornings were always designed to take the least amount of time.  I could get coffee, a shower, dressed and out of the house in half an hour or even less if needed or if coffee was already made.  Mornings were about effective uses of time, where efficiency is defined by getting out the door and out into the world. 

I’m not a morning person then or now.  I don’t yearn for the quiet of a house sleeping, or the dim-blue first-light-of-day filtering through our kitchen window.   I don’t get up early to write, or exercise, or play guitar and if by chance I wake up at five a.m. I force myself to go back to sleep.  Why is it that of all the vestiges I have shed in this new life, in all the ways my life has been made easier by death, that this is the last thing I hold on to? 
  
I know that the bus isn’t coming. 
But there is this moment. 
Where there is coffee, 
and I pause.
and I  
breathe. 

Comments

Jeanne Lee said…
Beautiful.
6:40 PM
Grandpa Man said…
Loving and grief combine until the nectar of life reaches out again. Sweet comments. Write a Christmas song soon, the world will welcome that too.
7:40 PM
grace notes by grace bell said…
Pretty sweet Evan. Not surprised here to read the goodness of your words and the way you write them, too. Thanks for sharing.
9:23 PM
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