More | Day 22

H's mom has been in the hospital for the past two weeks, and we've been asking the questions necessary when age and heart disease and modern medicine collide. Tough questions. Tougher answers. And sometimes no answers at all.

So I do what I can. I stand at the edge of our bed, in front of the window where the sun warms my back. Needle and thread in hand, I work to repair a tear in the seam of the comforter that I love. I need to take it to the laundry, but it can't be washed until it's mended. I work the tip of the needle through the layers of fabric and batting and back through fabric again and the thread joins the two edges together until you can barely tell they'd been torn apart.

I picture my mother-in-law in her hospital bed, hundreds of miles away, and I wonder if she is bored. Or afraid. And I wish I could make my way down the hallway with its industrial strength carpet and fluorescent lights and in to her room to stand by the side of her bed instead of standing here beside my own.

That afternoon, I pick up the phone and dial the number to her hospital room. Her voice on the other end is raspy and weak. I ask her how she's feeling, and what the doctor said today and she rushes past those questions to something else that's on her mind. "Dee," she says to me. "You know what? Today I heard your voice. I heard you calling my name. I heard your voice, out in the hallway. You were calling my name."

What I notice while she speaks is that I'm not surprised. Instead, I'm thinking of that comforter, with the two parts sewn together again, and how you can barely tell they'd ever been separated, and how there is more to this life and this world than we will ever know.