brain stem hemorrhage

at almost exactly 6pm yesterday, 36 hours ago, my dad got home from work. i was sitting on the front porch with the dogs. he answered his phone as he walked over to me and i heard him say "who's with her?" and "get her to the ER."

he left for the hospital with my mom and i stayed home to take care of the dogs and because i'm a selfish cunt.

my father's middle sister has had an atrial fibrillation which apparently let a blood clot slip through her system where it lodged in the stem of her brain and caused a massive hemorrhage. i'm a bit foggy on what happened after that, but i know that any fluid flooding the skull will cause irreparable damage to the brain. the brain simply cannot be impacted in such a massive way - or in any way, i'd imagine. i'm not an expert in neurology, but if you think about such a sensitive piece of machinery being held in a solid case, and then something else suddenly filling that case by squeezing that machine against the wall and squishing all its operating parts, you realize that that piece of machinery is not going to recover.

but she'd been married since she graduated from high school. Married married. as in every single night making dinner for this man and watching tv with him and raising their kids together and watching the grandkids and being married to this man since she was nearly a decade younger than i am.

and she came home from work yesterday and talked to her husband, probably about their grandkids' soccer games or what he wanted for dinner or some stupid bullshit she'd had to deal with that day, and suddenly her side of the conversation turned into strings of unrelated words while he listened, and then he watched her collapse and seize up and it was just any other friday except that he was holding his wife, the girl he wooed in a red convertible when he was a teenager and married straight out of high school, he was holding her and dialing 911, holding her until the EMTs strapped her down and drove her away.

the ER CT scan told us what happened, and the DNR order was signed, and the life support will be pulled in a few hours, and it was just a friday night. it was every friday for the last forty years. and now there aren't any more friday nights.

just like that.

my family has seen a lot of important people go in the past couple years, but never like this. never without months of waiting, of preparing, of setting everything in order. never like this.

i didn't process it until an hour ago on my drive home from work. it didn't hit me at all. i just got the medical updates from my mom and nodded like i know shit about medicine. "oh ok, what are the CTs like? what's her condition? is she responsive?" like i have any idea what that means.

what it means is that the last time i saw her she watched me in a music video and said she liked it, and that's the last of my work she'll ever see. it means there's no more growth, i don't get to know anything about her beyond what my dad and - holy fuck - surviving aunt tell me about her. that's it.

her entire life, her whole story, ended on a friday afternoon like every other friday afternoon. there were so many things left unresolved, but that's how they'll stay, because on a friday afternoon like every other friday afternoon a blood clot lodged in her brain stem and hemorrhaged there, and now she's gone.