salvation

when i said good-bye to my great-grandmother for the final time at clarkson i also asked that she let her daughter-in-law helen know how much i missed knowing her. i didn't say that bit out loud. i thought it really hard and hoped with all my seventh grade might my comatose grandmother could pick it up in the air as she passed through to heaven. like a note you find in your lunchbox at school.

when i said good-bye to her son at the same hospital for the final time my sophomore year he told me to get back to college and study hard. i smiled and told my grandfather how much i loved him in my head. i hoped it was something he'd pick up on his way out, too.

my family had sat in quiet wait at clarkson so many times that my great-aunt mused how she'd grown accustomed to the place, that the sadness and angst of sitting in the family lounge had worn off even as she knew this wait would be short and our last. aunt betty had picked her head up from her book and gently expressed the odd feeling i had in my stomach. what i imagine we all had.

i used to daydream about giving birth there in omaha. just so my kids could be real nebraskans like their mom, so they could come in to the air my loved ones had exited. what i have are full-fledged iowa kids born in the same northeast iowa hospital as their father and uncles. it was a livable plan b and more sane than driving five and a half hours in labor. not that i didn't get a little excited for an unplanned clarkson birth when at thirty-six weeks and five days owen was giving me fits at his uncle's wedding. because pregnancy makes me loopy like that and forget how much i depend on our ob/gyn and adore our birthing center and the short post-natal hour drive home with a newborn you fear will choke on his or her gurgling and bumps. have-mercy-on-a-new-mom bumps that remind one how a tahoe's suspension is really a truck's, not a car's.

and so it felt like a homecoming pulling into the hospital parking lot two weeks ago. i wanted to get the kids and explore what had remained and what had changed from my memory. the old brass wall plaques next to flat screens. vern and i went directly to the nicu and signed in behind our three-day-old niece's divider in the log book. we fell into that comfortable routine of sitting and waiting and watching our loved one sleep as the machines beeped and scrolled and pumped her blood in and out. the family lounge. football. hand sanitizers. and repeat.

a dear friend asked if she would be baptized, this little baby whose physical being had been saved by a bypass machine. i considered the added complexities of last rites and just-in-case baptisms to the clarkson routine as i listened to the brief explanation that in her family we didn't. then i considered how i hadn't even considered it.

God loved this babe so much he had already armed her with anne as her mother. untethered. anchored. the safest place on God's earth was with anne for with anne there is always God. in a stunningly beautiful mix of humor and hormone and hugs.

when i said good-bye to eisley for the first time i told her how happy i was to see her and in my head i told her how much we loved her and more. as if her soul could pick up my thoughts better than any audible words i'd have said. like the air was already well primed to carry this type of message for me.

plus there were two nurses in the room and they didn't need to hear how i amuse myself sometimes while switching laundry by imagining the reaction the purse snatcher had when s/he saw uncle charley's picture in her mom's purse. the ps must have known anne somehow to have access to her locker. i always wondered if, as anne was dating eisley's dad sean then, the ps had acquired some cash and as bonus an assumption that anne was carrying on a secret affair with another guy. or funnier still, if the ps had never met sean and thought sean liked to dress in high-styled 1970's fashion - which at the time had not come back into popularity.