I Can Barely Make Past Eleven

Really uncool chicks would shuffle out of their rooms and into the hallway to complain "Quiet hours started at eleven!!!!" and somehow I was always the unfortunate one who would come into eye contact with one of them, get uncomfortable although I was one of the cool chicks, my drink in hand, leaning against the wall, talking to some guy.

Eventually coed parties of the first two years of college gave way to girls only drinking fests held in our singles, but the scolding didn't stop. Again, I was always the one to care, ssshing my friends to please keep quiet--I was supposed to be a role model to the first-years on my floor. As the floor's student advisor, I was supposed to enforce the rules and yet I somehow always found myself in the midst of all the late-night chaos.

Nowadays I can barely make it past eleven without falling asleep on the couch. My current job, a preschool teacher, requires me to clock in at 7:45 am. Once again, I seem to have found myself in a situation where I don't remember consciously making the decision to commit to signing away my night life and signing up to a rise-before-the-sun-does existence. Yet here I am, getting paid pretty much nothing to do something to which I really didn't give much thought.

Making conscious choices and giving these choices the time they deserve is really much harder than I thought. At 34, I thought it would be second nature. After all, I got married, had a child, chose a career, decided to end it, begun another one. It is surprisingly difficult to live life consciously.

Then again something happens and your entire body is jolted out of the fog you live in and emergency landed into the frigid Hudson. Someone you barely know dies but because of what you lived with them, through them and around them, you are touched and changed forever inexplicably.

Mom's been recovering from a pulmonary embolism attack this past week. She was hospitalized last Sunday, exactly a week ago, and I have been staying with her at the hospital since. Her first two nights here were in a shared room. On the second night, they brought in an 86-year-old who was suffering from pneumonia. Her son accompanied her and kept her company throughout the evening. When night came, he crept out for a nap on the stretcher in the hallway so I was the only one left awake in the room. I spent most of the night taking cat naps on the chair next to my mother's bed, getting up to check the levels on her oxygen tank or the numbers on the machine that measured how much oxygen was actually going into her lungs.

The 86-year-old, İsmihan Teyze, moaned most of the night. Once I noticed she was uncomfortably slouching on the raised bed so I tried to lift her up into a better position. She was so small, so frail, opened her eyes a couple of times whenever I went over to stroke her hand or fix her pillows, but was clearly in a pneumonic daze.

The next morning, she seemed to be doing better. Having been tube-fed fluids, she greeted her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters with visible enthusiasm. They were clearly happy to see she was doing better and seemed to understand exactly what her stroke-induced-garbles meant.

Mom was transfered to a private room that day but I kept visiting İsmihan Teyze throught the week. Her son and daughter stopped by to say hello to my mother a couple of times as well, the bonds established that night stronger than anything we had experienced before. When I came back from spending time with the kid today (they don't let children into this unit,) mom told me they stopped by again and that I should go over and say hello to İsmihan Teyze at some point.

I couldn't right away. Mom needed to use the bathroom, have her covers fixed, her medicine prepared, her food heated, her water bottle refilled, her arms massaged, her hands lotioned--the endless requests of a bed-ridden patient on the road to recovery. She wanted to watch a movie so I put "Shall We Dance?" on the laptop and started watching with her.

After the movie I walked over to İsmihan Teyze's room to find her bed empty. At the same time I asked where she was I remembered hearing the noisy rattle of the stretcher being rushed towards the elevator at some point. We were watching the movie and I remembered thinking someone must have died. It was İsmihan Teyze.

I came back to mom's room and couldn't keep the tears inside as I told her what had happened. I can't stop thinking about the old woman we came to know in seven short days. We heard snippets of her life but it was clearly filled with so much more. I'm watching mom sleep right now--I think of her life. I watched home videos of the kid earlier tonight--I think of the life she will make. I think of my grandmother's--almost 78 years of ups and downs--with hopefully, another decade or two to go. Scientists are saying that the majority of our generation will live through 100. We seem to have more time than our ancestors have had to try to figure this out.

So do I keep partying like it's 1996 or do quiet hours need to start at eleven? Or do I, for once, make a choice and be happy with it and stop living a life in a "How did I get here?" haze?

These days, all I seem to want to do is be a witness to the lives lived around me and stop trying to make something out of mine. Is that so wrong?