The last exhale is distinctive, recognizable. It is accompanied with an involuntary gentle thrust of the chin away from the body, an arching of the neck, a slightly exaggerated parting of the lips for an attempted but unsuccessful gasp. There is a limpness to the body, a resignation that immediately follows life being expelled. Some people live their whole lives never witnessing this moment. Ellen wasn't one of them.
When Ellen's father Isaac parted with his last exhale, she was present. A trickle of tears pooled out the sides of his closed eyes, commanded by gravity along a crease to his temple until absorbed into his hair. Almost imperceptibly, Ellen wiped the water away with the back of her index finger and whispered something meant to be comforting. When he passed, Issac was crying, scared and medically paralyzed lying under an aluminum-foil-looking blanket. He went in precisely a way he had never wanted to go.
A few hours earlier, Ellen had arrived at the Intensive Care Unit, unsure and confused. She had navigated from security and the queue at the hospital doors, to the sign-in where she'd been given her father's room and floor. She was directed to a sanitization station after writing her particulars and then was visually supervised in smearing a pre-portioned amount of disinfectant gel generously onto her hands. The smell of the alcohol in the hand sanitizer hit the back of her throat, but her empty stomach couldn't respond to the nausea with any more than a churn. She hated her hands being smelly, cold, wet, and sticky.
It was peculiar to see both the gift and coffee shops closed. She made her way to a lobby area just outside the busy elevators to travel up to the ICU. The elevator request panels were lit, so she took her place, holding up a wall. She stood flamingo-style dividing her weight between her left leg and her cane. Her back was flat against the wall, her right sneaker just below her bum. No one had spoken on the ride up, other than to call out the floors they wanted to the button presser. Pleasantries and small talk weren't expected, but the social norm of one person at the helm of the elevator ride persisted.
At the seventh floor, she exited onto a landing area filled with sunshine, chairs, sanitizer dispensers and directional signs. An arrow led her to a nurses station on a very quiet ward. She gave Isaac's name to the attending nurse and proceeded down the hall as directed. Ellen almost immediately identified a pair of feet as belonging to Isaac's wife, Suzanne. The swollen veiny ankles in sensible shoes were crossed and tilted at an angle that inspired a visceral response. How many hours of her life had Ellen spent staring at those feet, receiving anger.
Suzanne was sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed hidden from the calf up in the right-hand corner of a very bright but windowless room. Ellen squinted against the white light. Hunched slightly over the wood of her cane, Ellen walked slowly trying hard to decide what the right greeting might be for this uncommon and overwhelming situation. She couldn't chose a greeting without pitfalls so decided to just slip wordless into the left corner of the room, opposite Suzanne.
There were empty chairs to either side of Suzanne. Ellen, like a charge repelled by its opposite, felt pushed and tried to find a place to stand out of eye-line but nearly collided with hospital personnel. She wasn't meant to stay standing. She'd already been on her feet throughout the check-in process and had hoped to sit. To ease the weight of her body off of her right hip, she leaned heavily on her cane. This gave her the silhouette of someone elderly.
Suzanne, seemingly unprovoked, began moaning loudly and wildly, her head rolling from side to side slowly at first, along the top of her chair's backrest. She started to slump down, the head rolling increased in speed. Someone strained attempting to keep her from falling out of her chair and rushed to link arms. This jello-posture was perhaps meant to properly demonstrate grief, but looked to Ellen the way a person possessed looked in horror movies. Isaac 's wife had always been a big believer in demonstrative emotion.
