Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mike
There’s a feeling a surfer has when everything looks calm on the surface, but unknown to you, something ominous is brewing below.
That moment when the wave you've been waiting and preparing for turns into a massive wall of impenetrable water, and your reverent fear of the ocean’s power is tested to its limit.
It happened to me once a few years ago, and now it was happening to me again right here in this hospital.
When I walked out of Grammy’s ICU room after holding her hand and begging God not to take her, I felt that same overwhelming churning in my stomach, my chest tight, unable to catch my breath as I did on the board that day.
The nurses looked concerned as I passed their desk, but they couldn’t do anything for me. No one could.
That now-familiar darkness was creeping into every bright place in my heart that I’d enjoyed since Ren’s arrival.
The darkness began the day Grammy was rushed to this very hospital six months ago with a broken hip and a concussion.
I feared losing her then, and the aftermath was a descent into depression I’d never experienced before.
But a new realization slid into my consciousness.
I’d felt something similar in childhood, when I felt abandoned while my parents were away on their trips.
And this was my secret. The one I shared with no one.
What could they do anyway? This was my demon to slay. Alone.
I huffed out a humorless laugh at the injustice of my quiet despair not being enough of a burden to carry. The fear of losing the love and respect of Grammy and my friends if they discovered how messed up I was forced me to keep this secret locked away.
When I faced that menacing wall of water on my board, I thought, “this might be the one that takes me under.” Trudging to the ICU waiting room where my friends waited for news on Grammy, the same thought intruded into my battered mind.
This might truly be the one that takes me under.
The doctors were still running tests. Their expressions were quiet and restrained, no doubt the result of years of experience dealing with distraught family members. I wondered what they’d do if I just started screaming, letting loose the torrent of emotions building inside me like that wave.
As I wandered the halls toward the waiting room, I knew I needed to be patient when I was told there were no answers other than she might have suffered a heart attack. I’d pushed my hand violently through my hair so many times I could almost imagine what it looked like.
It didn’t make sense. To my knowledge, she had no heart issues. Unless it was just as I’d feared. She had been keeping it from me.
The intrusive thought made my chest tighten even more. She looked so frail and small in that huge hospital bed, tubes in her arms that I knew would leave bruises on her tender skin, machines around her beeping. A sound I already knew would haunt me if I ever slept again.
I didn’t even have the strength to pretend to be the strong Christian people knew me as. Nor did I have it in me to be uplifting and optimistic. The emptiness was too great, too powerful. I had nothing in me to draw from and give to anyone else.
Walking into the waiting room, I was hit by another wall.
A wall of loving and concerned friends who surrounded me, each telling me they were praying, asking how I was, what they could do.
As much as I appreciated them, their words all sounded like they were underwater.
The same water threatening to steal the very breath from my lungs.
That’s when I saw her in my periphery.
Renata.
Just her name made my breathing slow. She was wringing her hands as she stood watching on the outside of my friend circle, fear causing her beautiful face to contract with pain.
I loved my friends, especially my best guy, Niko, who held me so tight I thought he might be trying to keep my pieces together.
All of them had become so precious to me. But the woman standing several feet away from me, unsure of what to do, brought out a vulnerability in me that made me take my first real breath in hours.
When I held my arms open, not sure what I was even asking of her, she ran into them and wrapped herself around me, cocooning me from the painful outside world. My face pushed into the crook of her neck, and I could breathe again.
Deep breaths, Mike. Deep breaths. It’s going to be okay now.
Her gardenia scent filled my lungs, as her wild curls tickled my face, and suddenly the floodgates opened.
Heart-wrenching sobs broke from me like a dam that had been straining to hold back the floodwater but couldn’t anymore.
And I didn’t want to stop them. If I’d kept in this pain any longer, I truly believed I might be the next person to be admitted to this awful place.
Then her sweet, angelic voice began to pray for me, and a verse from Isaiah came to mind. A verse that Grammy said helped her after Grandpa left this world.
“Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God.”
In that moment, I knew God had brought Ren all the way from Italy to be with me. Nothing could convince me otherwise. And when she asked me what she could do, pleaded with me to tell her how she could help, the words came from somewhere deep in my soul. Unstoppable. Real. True. Right.
Marry me.