Issues in Iran, dissention in DC, a teenage “activist” calling out a tennis champion, a comedian calling out celebrities (which I actually enjoyed upon learning about the incident)…. All of these recent events, and so many more, confirm that the world is in its usual state of turmoil.
We are blessed, or cursed, with the opportunity to be made aware of as much of it as we choose almost immediately after it happens – sometimes even when it’s just believed that it could possibly happen. Technology has indeed made the world a small place in ways. Yet in ways the distance between us, and all that goes on around us, can still be quite vast.
It was approximately 3:30 a.m. when the phone woke my husband and I from our sleep. It was one of those calls that everyone dreads. His sister, who had been struggling with significant health issues ranging from long-since diagnosed congestive heart failure and type 2 diabetes to more recently diagnosed end stage renal failure, was found to be unresponsive by staff at her assisted living facility.
It was rare that his sister went even an entire month without a hospitalization so this wasn’t an entirely new incident. Still, as my husband said later, something felt different about this one.
About 20 minutes later the ER doctor called. She told him that his sister’s heart had stopped, but compressions had brought her back; without additional intervention she had only minutes left to live. My husband chose to abide by his sister’s consistently stated wishes and told the doctor, “She’s been through enough. Let her go.”
By the time we made the 20 minute trip to the hospital, she was gone.
When people are standing in a hospital room saying their goodbyes, the world becomes as small as it can be. Very little outside of those muted green or subdued blue walls matters for those hours or days that the family is watching and waiting for that sad end.
In time the world starts to grow bigger again, and we start to realize that while we were in that smallest of spaces other people were too.
Over the next few days as we began to process her loss and to deal with the vast amount of details that fell to my husband, as she had neither married nor had children, another family was experiencing their own personal crisis.
I have never met this family and likely never will, but I read their story on their Facebook site because it was shared on the Facebook site of The Chadtough Foundation, a site created by a local family who lost their son Chad, the grandson of former University of Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr, to Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG), a relatively rare but very aggressive brain tumor.
In early 2019 Mikeal had been diagnosed with DIPG. As we were emptying my sister-in-law’s assisted living apartment the day after she passed, this family was gathered together in a hospital room on the east coast watching their teenage daughter, niece, cousin, as her life was slipping away from her. Her temperature had reached 104 degrees, “tumor fever,” her body was unable to continue to fight.
And the next day as my husband dealt with details that I don’t even completely remember while I got caught up with laundry and other things that needed to be done at our house, Mikeal took her final breaths.
It was social media that placed me, and thousands of others, in contact with the story of Mikeal and her family. Yet the well wishes from social media were certainly secondary. Though so many strangers may feel for them, and even say a prayer for them, we couldn’t replace those special people who had gathered in that hospital room to watch their young loved one take her final breath.
In some of those small spaces people’s worlds were falling apart. In some of those spaces people were accepting the inevitable. But in some of those spaces people were celebrating the joy of life.
I remember thinking not long after my sister-in-law’s passing how much fun it is when the world revolves around you and your family because nieces, nephews, and grandchildren are born. But life gives us both the chance to step into those little spaces when life begins and when it ends.
The people who matter most to us are the people who share those smallest of spaces, whether physically, or through a phone call, text, or PM.
It was my plan to conclude this post by stating that living globally may well be the new narrative, but it holds little meaning and no real value in those moments when your world becomes small,
However, in order to finish this post, I looked once again at the Facebook page Miracle for Mikeal’s DIPG, and I found that her “Celebration of a Beautiful Life” is actually scheduled to take place on the same day that we will be remembering my sister-in-law’s life.
Two families separated by over 500 miles will be saying their goodbyes on Saturday afternoon, and I know about it because of the “world wide web.” I may be willing to consider the notion that, in some instances, the world is actually connected in more meaningful ways than I would have previously acknowledged.
The Listener 