The sixty-year-old woman is sleeping at the moment, so I sit on a worn brown couch in the family waiting room down the hall from Shirley. It’s not too far from the intensive care ward where she lays on the white, white sheets, connected in too many ways to the machines that keep her alive or that measure whether she is, or is not.

This windowless refuge gives no hints about day or night, winter or summer. Two half-done jigsaw puzzles await completion on small tables. There is a television, but it isn’t on. Shelves of books beckon, ranging from bodice rippers to bibles, most of them looking worn. Just down the hall is a small chapel.

The lighting in the waiting room is incandescent amber and not LED bright white or fluorescent blue. It is a calming light. At the moment I am the only one from our little vigil troop on duty at the hospital. The others are off sleeping or otherwise experiencing their lives, taking a break from the task at hand. Later today I’ll get a break, but sometimes I stay here anyway. I don’t live in this town, so there is really no place for me to go when I’m not here at the hospital.

Looking at my watch I see it is almost time to go back to Shirley’s room. Not that it matters, really. The schedule is more for me than it is for her. Thirty minutes by her side, holding her hand, and thirty minutes here in the waiting room, or sometimes in the cafeteria. Keeping the schedule helps keep me from losing my mind. After all, it has been twenty days now. I don’t know how people hold on for months or years.

Shirley is not my mother. She is my father’s second wife. They married long after I’d left home and started my own life in a town far away. My mother is in California now, with her new husband. My father passed away in the car accident that left Shirley hanging on by a thread. Dad shouldn’t have been driving; however, alcohol never helped his decision-making abilities. She wouldn’t have told him not to drive that night. I think Shirley was afraid to speak up when he behaved badly which is probably why my dad married her.

Here’s the thing about Shirley: she never really had much of a family growing up. By the time she married Dad she was too old to have children and Dad’s drinking made adoption of a child impossible. Instead, she had me and my sisters to love, and she did love us, beyond any reasonable expectation. An objective third party would agree that she loved us more than our own mother, and certainly more than our father. Right from the start she embraced us—literally and figuratively—as her own, and worried and cared for us intensely.

So, here I am. Spending weeks in the hospital with someone I don’t know that well who is not really a relative, but who needs me to be there each time she wakes up. I don’t need her, but she needs me . . . and Sally and Rose. When she sees us her face lights up, despite the tubes and tapes and wires attached to it.

As I rise to leave the waiting room, a young couple comes in. He has his arm around her shoulders as she cries. He and I make eye contact for a moment and share an unspoken “I don’t know what to do.” Nobody knows what to do in the waiting room

Outside Shirley’s room Jan, the nurse on duty, is waiting for me. She is wearing magenta scrubs today. She knows my schedule by now.

“Shirley just woke up from a nap. Her vital signs are unchanged. I don’t think the infection is getting any better, but the doctor is still hopeful. I think she’s looking forward to seeing you.”

I step in and give Shirley a little wave. She smiles. It is hard for her to talk with the various lifelines in her nose and mouth. I sit down in the orange leatherette chair and scootch it closer to her bed. I take her hand, and she gives mine a squeeze. I start talking.

“Shirley, I hear you had a good nap. That’s great! Sleeping helps your body get better. Jan, who is your nurse today, says your vital signs are all unchanged, so that’s good too.”

I don’t really know if it is good or bad news but not getting worse feels like a positive to me. She smiles at me again and closes her eyes. I feel another hand squeeze.

“Rose and Sally will be coming by later today to see you. They had some errands to do and needed to get some sleep. I know they’re thinking about you all the time. Your neighbor, Mr. Hardy, sent some flowers for you. See them, over there on the shelf?”

Shirley opens her eyes again and sees the flowers. They also make her smile. It is spring, but too early for there to be natural flowers, so these are from Central America. Still pretty, though. I think Mr. Hardy sent them for Dad’s “celebration of life” service, but the funeral home guy had them sent over here. Shirley doesn’t need to know all that.

When the accident happened, it was winter. Snowy and cold. Shirley’s only view of the outside world comes from the local news she sees on the television set up in the corner of the room. They waited two days to tell her my dad died in the crash. I was there when they told her. It was hard to tell how she felt about it. She may have figured it out before they said anything. I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite certain he was not very nice to her. I think the best part of their marriage, from her perspective, was me and my sisters.

“So, Shirley, are you feeling any better?”

She shrugs.

“Your body went through quite a shock. I’m sure it will take some time for you to heal.”

Shirley nods in understanding and then closes her eyes again. We’re still holding hands.

It’s a little disconcerting for me to spend so much time with Shirley. Like I said, I don’t really know her very well. I met her two years ago and I’ve probably visited with her half a dozen times since then. She does send me texts and shares things from Facebook she thinks I’ll like. She even calls to check in now and then. My parents never did any of those things.

What makes it hardest is we don’t know if she’s going to recover or not. The nurses and doctors are cheerful in front of her, but when I look closely at them, I can see what looks like resignation. It’s like they’re watching a play they’ve seen before, and they know how it ends. “Internal organs” is the category that concerns them. Bit by bit they are failing.

I reach for the remote control and find Murder She Wrote, since I know Shirley likes that show. I put the remote with the speaker in it next to her head so she can hear the program over the sounds of the machines that are keeping her alive, or at least trying to.

A commercial comes on. I reach over to mute the speaker, and I bend over Shirley so she can see and hear me well.

“Shirley, there’s something I want to tell you. You are the nicest, kindest person I have ever met, and even though I didn’t grow up with you as my mother I wish I had. I’m an adult now, and I have come to think of you as my mom, and I wanted to thank you for being who you are, and the way you are.”

I reached down and kissed her forehead. I sat back down on the chair and smiled at her. She was smiling and crying. She closed her eyes again.

Jan the magenta nurse came in and asked me to step out for a few minutes as she took care of some personal things for Shirley. So, I did. I went out of the intensive care unit and walked up to the window overlooking the parking lot. I saw my car. It’s odd to see your car from up high like that.

Here’s why I said what I said to Shirley about feeling like she is my mom. People die every day. Some are in the hospital, some are in bed at home, some are at war. After they die, we all get in line to say nice things about them. I wanted to make sure that Shirley heard what I had to say before she died. Maybe she’ll be fine. I don’t know. But if she isn’t, she’ll at least know how I feel about her, and that may help to balance the good and bad parts of her life before it ends.

And, selfishly, I guess, I won’t have to spend my life wishing I had told Shirley how important she was to me.

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