Some Time Missed Can’t Be Gotten Back

“I thought I could make it. I really thought I could make it.” These are the words uttered on repeat by Dennis Grey as he sits on the flimsy chairs at gate 32 at London Heathrow Airport. He hasn’t missed his flight, but the final moments of his wife’s life.

Standing outside Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Dennis waits for the car that will bring him to his equally distraught and outraged mother-in-law. She told him not to agree to the work trip. She told him that Emily needed him. She told him that if he walked into the airport Emily might not be there when he comes back. He took the work trip anyway. He thought that surely, she would still be there. The cancer had been this way for months, with no change. Why should he think that during this work trip would be the time his ten year-old daughter has to call 911 because the machines connected to her mother’s heart had stopped beeping. That instead they had resorted to a long, deafening, and resolute tone.

As Dennis staggered up the steps to the house that had once held so much light and joy in his life, he got a glimpse of the misery and resentment that would wash over him the minute he would walk through the door. This realization was such a contradiction to the past memories and experiences. Dennis thought back to when he and Emily had first gotten the house. He remembered the elation and hope that filled his new wife’s face as they shook the realtor’s hand. Another memory comes to mind, with a similar picture of Sarah in her grandmother’s arms. Sarah’s first birthday, with Emily standing over the two, smiling while her mom held her granddaughter for the first time. A joyous day that ended in Margaret yelling at Dennis, blaming him for taking away her granddaughter, when it had been Emily that had pushed for the move.There they were, crumbled on to the couch together, his little Sarah sobbing into her grandmother’s arms. This sight reinforced the guilt that had been seeping into his heart. Dennis should’ve been there, it was his responsibility. He was the father, the husband, but he wasn’t there. Margaret had picked up the slack. Margaret had met the ambulance that carried a crying child. The ambulance that held the lifeless body of what used to be his beautiful, joyful wife, her daughter.

“Why weren’t you there?” Margaret asks, her voice shaking under the pressure of her grief. Dennis had just put a tearful Sarah to bed, keeping himself composed while trying to reassure Sarah that they would be okay, even though he could not think of how they possibly could be.

“It was a last minute work trip,” Dennis explained forlornly. “It was going to finish paying for Emily’s chemo.”

“And you thought that it was more important than being there for your family? For your wife?” Dennis had been on the receiving end of a lot of disappointment from his mother-in-law, but never had it felt like this.

“I thought I could make it. I really thought I could make it,” Dennis sobbed as he deflated onto one of the kitchen stools, the weight of the day catching up with him.