Things I Wish I Had Said at the Hospital

Things I Wish I Had Said at the Hospital

They said you might still hear me.

That even in a coma, somewhere beneath the wires, the beeping, the sterile hum of machines — a part of you might still be listening.

I sat in the plastic chair outside the ICU for three hours before I worked up the nerve to go in. My coffee went cold twice. My phone buzzed with texts from people who wanted updates I didn’t have. I stared at the flickering fluorescent light above the nurses’ station and hated how the world kept moving.

And I hated you.

Still.

Even here.

Even now.

They told me not to expect much.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” the nurse said, gently, like you say to a child whose balloon just slipped into the sky.

But here’s what I wish I had said:

I’m angry at you.

Let’s start with that. You always said I should be honest, so here it is — unfiltered, like you used to pour your gin. I’m angry that you never told me why you left. Angry that you packed your things the night before my 13th birthday and said nothing. Angry that you sent postcards instead of phone calls. That you showed up to my graduation two hours late, smelling like smoke and nostalgia.

I’m angry that you only came back when cancer decided to finish the job first.

I used to imagine this moment differently.

In my version, you were lucid. Awake. Sitting up in bed with that smug smirk you always wore when you knew you were winning. And I’d walk in, and we’d have it out — years of silence and bitterness thrown like plates against a wall. Then we’d cry. Then maybe we’d laugh. Then, maybe, if we both got tired enough of being right, we’d say we missed each other.

But here you are. Unconscious. Tubes snaking out of you like roots from a dying tree. And here I am, talking to a ghost that hasn’t left yet.

You were a terrible mother. But you were mine.

And somewhere between the broken Christmases, the slammed doors, and the years you forgot my birthday entirely, there were moments I clung to.

Like when you used to braid my hair before school and whispered, “Head high. No one gets to knock our crown off.”

Like the time you sat outside my college dorm for three hours in the rain because you heard I failed a class and didn’t want me to cry alone.

You were storm and shelter all in one body.

And I hated you for that.

And I loved you for it, too.

I forgive you.

Not because you earned it.

Not because time softens all sharp edges.

But because carrying this weight has made me tired. And I want to feel light again.

So, I forgive you for not being the mother I wanted.

For being the complicated, haunted, dazzling woman you were instead.

And I’m sorry, too.

I’m sorry I never wrote back to your letters. That I threw the last one away unopened. That I said I’d visit last year and then didn’t even call. That I told people you were dead just because it made explaining our distance easier.

I’m sorry I waited until now to say any of this — when your eyes are closed and your hands don’t twitch when I say your name.

I love you.

There.

That’s the hardest one.

Not because it isn’t true.

But because it is.

I love you in that complicated, aching way children love parents who never quite loved them back the way they needed. I love you in spite of the holes you left behind. I love you in every trait I inherited — my fire, my sarcasm, my stubborn refusal to give up even when it hurts.

You were never easy to love.

But you were never unloved, either.

The nurse came in just now. Said I had ten more minutes.

She didn’t ask what I’d been saying.

Just looked at me with those practiced eyes — the kind that know when a goodbye is happening.

So I stood up.

Walked over.

Took your hand.

It was warm. Which felt wrong, somehow.

“Hey,” I whispered. “I’m here.”

Your monitor beeped the same way it always had.

Nothing miraculous. No flutter of eyelashes. No final breath.

Just the hum of machines and the weight of things I’d finally let go of.

I walked out of the ICU into the July heat, unsure if you'd wake up.

Unsure if you’d hear any of what I said.

But for the first time in years, I felt something shift —

like maybe the version of you I’d been carrying inside me had finally let go, too.