The Weight of Not Knowing
When I was a kid, my mom used to say “where there’s life, there’s hope”.
I believe this. But what if there’s uncertainty about the existence of life? What if you just don’t know if there is life?
As the families of the Surfside condo occupants wait to find out the fate of their loved ones, I’m taken back to the night I hosted uncertainty. And, remembering the pain of the experience, I hope that they soon get resolution. Truly, I wish that the responders would make it a recovery operation and let people breathe. Because right now, I think that they neither inhale nor exhale.
In 2016, my husband went into his bathroom and was in there for so long that — for the first time ever — I walked into the bathroom without even knocking. I found him on the floor, holding his eyeglasses. I had to pull the glasses from his fingers, tugging a few times. I called 911 and the operator asked me if I knew how to give resuscitation. I said I didn’t but I’m a quick learn and will do it. The operator told me she needed to first know if he was breathing.
I put my fingers under his nostrils. I rubbed his back. I even took my nail and strongly dragged it from the top of the crack of his behind to his middle back. I thought he responded and called him Sweetheart. But then I didn’t see response and — truly, I’m not an idiot — I wasn’t sure if he was breathing.
By this time, the paramedics arrived and I pointed them to the bathroom. The police arrived moments later and I stayed in the kitchen with one of the officers while the rest of the officers roamed the house.
This was the longest 20 minutes of my life. Several times I watched the paramedics leave the house, go to their vehicle and return to the house. They brought an EKG machine and I don’t know what else. I stayed with the officer, wondering how they too couldn’t tell my husband’s status. As one of them passed nearby, I asked him if my husband was still alive. He said they were still checking.
In my heart, I believed my husband died. But because they hadn’t confirmed this, I had hope that perhaps he was alive and had very shallow respiration. Not knowing was terrible because I sat evenly between believing he was gone and hoping he wasn’t.
The heaviness of these moments pressed on my chest and the silence in the room pressured my eardrums. Life was frozen in time except for my thoughts that raced from knowing it was over to hoping it was not.
Eventually the paramedics came into the living room and I walked over to them. I told them he was dead and they nodded in agreement. In a way, I was relieved because my husband wasn’t suffering from any physical pain. I assume, as did everyone else, that he had a massive heart attack and died. In retrospect there were signs. The part of his face where his sinuses were turned dark. His fingers gripped his glasses tightly. He was on his knees with his elbow on the toilet seat cover and his head was between the cover and the side of the cabinet. He dropped to his knees and died.
I cannot tell you how much it hurt. But I no longer worried that he wasn’t getting the care he needed to live. There was no rush to get him to a hospital.
Somehow, I had it in me to enter the bathroom and say goodbye to him. To this day I don’t know how I had the ability to do it. I told him he was a wonderful husband and that he made me happier than I ever knew. I had presence of mind to remove his wedding ring and necklace that showcased his half of the Mizpah charm we shared.
As incredibly hard this moment was, I had closure. I didn’t have to keep hope alive. I knew.
I don’t wish anyone the pain of losing someone they love. My husband was my partner, my best friend. We built a life together. We counted on one another to pave a way toward many more decades together.
But not knowing if a loved one is alive or dead is a dreadful experience and no one can sustain the pain. So in that vein, I hope that those driving the response to the condo collapse “call it” and transition from a rescue operation to that of recovery. Recovery for both the victims and their loved ones.
