The silence that filled the hospice room in the late afternoons. The silence that echoed after the nurses changed shifts. The silence that followed every day my children did not walk through the door. Three of them.
Three lives I had poured everything into — birthdays, scraped knees, late-night fevers, college applications, job interviews, wedding speeches, all of it. And yet, in the moment when I needed them most, not one of them could be bothered to show up.
Not a phone call. Not a message. Not even a postcard. As I lay in that narrow bed, the ceiling tiles above me stained with years of slow leaks, I wondered what I had done wrong.
I had sacrificed my youth and my body for them, worked double shifts, missed holidays, swallowed my own hunger so they could eat. Yet now, at the end of my life, they couldn’t spare five minutes to say goodbye.
It was a kind of heartbreak no doctor could diagnose.
My only companions were the machines—quiet, steady, predictable—and a Purple Heart displayed on the small wooden shelf beside my bed. I had asked the nurse to put it there, not out of pride but because looking at it reminded me that at some point in my life, someone believed I mattered.Continue reading…
