Waiting

Three months had been lived (what a grace!) since my last checkup, and so I find myself walking down Cherry Street in downtown Grand Rapids yet again.  The wind skips like a fool behind me, shoving my shoulders and ruffling my hair, a young and lively and rakish spring wind.  He swings me around the corner of the brick building to the entrance, and I wave at the familiar red-suspendered figure of the valet as I duck through the automatic doors.   The wind does not stick around: one icy farewell gust, which nonetheless warms my spirit, and he's gone, and I'm wrapped in silence and the chillingly institutional warmth of the building. 

The smell hits me instantly: soap smell, clean and chemical and, to my remembering nose, faintly nauseating.  Each visit it bothers me less. 

I pass by the information desk and round the corner, past the elevator, to the Lack's Infusion Center, where the receptionist is giving directions to a smiling man in a sharp black suit.  He steps back deferentially to let me check in, and she calls my name to mind after a quick glance at her computer screen.  After verifying that my information has undergone no changes since my last appointment, she nods me over to the waiting room, calling to my back, "You look great!" 

The waiting room is a space within a space, like an organ of the body.  The far end of it curves to follow the curve of an exterior staircase, and part of the wall that curves is made of chunky cloudy glass squares, through which it is possible to discern the distorted shadows of people as they climb up or down the staircase.  There are no windows--just that milky glass and, on the other end of the room, an aquarium embedded in the wall with its disinterested culture of fish and bubbles. 

I choose a seat beside the mannequins, three red-lipped pouting stares on tiered shelves behind glass, with silken scarves around their long plastic necks and fashionable wigs covering their shiny bald heads.    They separate me from the nearest human occupants of the waiting room: an old man and two very young healthy-looking boys.  One of the boys catches my eye and I grin at him.  For a few moments we play a little game: he turns away from me, I pretend not to see him, and then--ha!  I catch his eye and grin, and he burrows his face against the old man's arm.  The game ends when a panting gray-haired lady steps into the waiting room and announces, "I'm done.  Let's get out of here."  The three men flurry around her, boys clutching her hands, man solicitously taking her purse from her and offering his arm. When they have left, I open my book and scan a few sentences.

Women in scrubs poke heads into the room and call names in conjunction with the name of a doctor.  People rise when summoned, vanish, and reappear after a few moments with bandages taped to the crook of their arms, or, after a longer timespan, to retrieve their moral support and belongings, shrug into their coats, and depart. 

I find myself regarding the carpet, which consists of huge blocks of various earth tones: green, yellow, brown, red, orange.  It looks to me like the colors are afflicted themselves with some disease, some cancer that has leeched them of brightness.  Suddenly I am seeing disease everywhere.  In the carpet, dull and stained and pulling apart at the seams.  In the mechanical wheezing of the computers across the room from me, which I know from experience are ridden with viruses, slow and outdated and destined for the junkyard before long.  In the glass wall's clouded vision.  In the half-empty styrofoam cup of coffee left to congeal on the puzzle table.  Every chip in the furniture catches my eye, every scratch in the shabby yellow paint.  I remember that the room is cut off from telephone tower reception, and even though I have no reason to call anyone, the thought troubles me.

The music begins to bother me, too.  It is elevator music, waiting room music, aimless and anesthetizing, empty technique.  It does not invite a response--if anything, it encourages disengagement of the emotions, lulls you into not-feeling. 

Heaps of magazines cover coffee tables and bulge out of shelves on the walls.  Two circular tables stand supporting unfinished puzzles.  I think about all the fingertips that have marked them, and about all the sets of brains that have regarded them.  All the lives on hold, penned up in this little waiting room.

Memories of previous visits always descend upon me eventually in this room.  First always is the image of one very ill woman who had been wheeled into the waiting room soon after I and my parents had arrived for our first consultation with my doctor, and the sick fright I had felt as I saw her piteous hollow unforgettable face--how like a death's head it looked when she smiled.  I don't let myself wonder about her long, a year since our paths crossed, because I think it unlikely that she is yet living, and that assumption twists my gut with a sort of baffled survivor's guilt.

Then I am remembering my first morning of chemo, a week after my discharge from the hospital, sitting with my father and my friend and the man I love on that very couch where today the old man with the gray ponytail is dozing alone.  I had been so relieved to have a conversation with a woman who was waiting for her mother to emerge from the chemo ward, to divert my mind by entering someone else's trouble, distancing myself from my own imminent treatment.  I remember how it hurt to sit and stand when my name was called, each movement tearing at the stitches that still zippered my stomach together.

The recollection has me jumping to my feet,  relieved at how easy and good the gesture feels, striding to the puzzle table, where this morbid bent in my brain has me dwelling on the--is it irony?--of placing enormous difficult puzzles in a waiting room to divert people who are grappling with enormous difficult problems in their lives.  And that awful artwork on the wall, disembodied hands releasing bright balloons into a blue sky.  Letting Go it is labeled, and seems to preside over those partially finished jigsaws and their jumbled unrealized potential. 

It happens every time I return here: this recognition that no matter how long I live, I will never be able to sit in this or any other waiting room and feel like I have done all I can.   The spectre of unfinished business will ever haunt me in places like this, spaces that bring me face to face with the fact of my finitude.  It is good for me to remember this.  It makes me weigh the potentials of my life in the scales of eternity.  It forces me to prioritize again, to shake my heart back into perspective.  And it drives me back to the Alpha and Omega, the only One who can give me grace to run my race, fight the good fight, keep the faith. 

Always I end up lost in prayer, waiting on God in the waiting room.

The wind is waiting for me as I stride back outdoors after my checkup and I draw in deep lungfuls of spring air as we walk back up Cherry Street towards my parked car, where I put the key in the ignition and resume things for as long as they are there for me to resume.  This side of Eden, resuming and faithfully resuming are my task.  I leave perfection to heaven.