Small Comforts

Would we make it? It was a recurring question, a running joke every time I pressed 5.

“Here goes nothing,” I said with dramatic flair. The elevator doors closed with a familiar clunk. This was followed by a vertical lurch and a deep groan from the building’s bowels.

“Jesus,” my wife said, reaching out with both arms—one seizing my hand, the other grasping the inside of my mother’s arm to steady her.

We were visiting my father at the hospital. This had been our routine more or less every day for four-and-a-half months, apart from my mother’s earlier bout with COVID-19, which kept her away for almost two weeks. Two weeks where she worried constantly about what would happen if he woke up—or worse—while she wasn’t there.

Deathwatch was how my wife and I referred to the situation, to it, his coma.

“He knows when we’re here,” my mother said in her Dutch accent, speaking to my reflection in the smudged metal doors.

“Yes,” Milena agreed in an assuring voice, also eying me in the doors. Even blurred, I knew that look.

Another lurch, and the doors crawled open. “We live another day,” I announced.