Suddenly our mother and father locked eyes at that kitchen table and had the same thought–“when he seized in the hospital his heart stopped.” They stood up. All five of us got in the station wagon. The hospital was 50 miles away, but nearby was Cliff, our oldest brother. He was on the local rescue squad and had gone to get oxygen from the ambulance and joined our parents on the trip to the hospital.
For years afterward, it was me who caught the seizure. Me who was awake.
I was five. I woke my father in the night because my brother was making noise keeping me awake. It turned out to be a seizure, and the story went into our family the way stories do — smoothed, shortened, improved. Connie heard him. Maybe God had kept Connie awake for a reason. Connie got her dad.
By the time it had settled into something told at gatherings, the part where nobody knew what to do had quietly fallen out of it. It was no longer a story about terrified parents on a party line to the doctor. It had become a story about a little girl who did the right thing. She was awake.
The praise was real and it was kindly meant. But what does praise to a child who is already watching–already hypervigilent.
A five-year-old cannot hear you happened to be awake. What she hears is this is what you are for.
He was in the hospital for at least a few days and our mother stayed with him. There was no visiting for me as the law at that time prevented anyone under age 15 from entering a hospital except in the most dire circumstances. I needed reassurance he was ok, and could not see him.
The testing found Rick was most likely to seize as he was falling asleep or waking up — the exact hours I was already lying in the dark listening. My post was confirmed. I did not stop checking after that night. I checked more, because now I knew I had been right once.
Praise is not the same as being asked.
That night was told and retold for years, no one turned to me and asked what it had been like to be the one who heard it. Not whether I had been frightened. Not what I thought was happening. The story was about what I had done. It was never about what had happened to me.
In fairness to every adult in that house: I gave them nothing to go on. I never cried. I looked entirely fine. Looking fine is what a five-year-old does in a situation where there is a high need sibling.
A child cannot make that distinction for herself. She only knows that when she watches, she keeps people alive, she matters — and she keeps watching.
Later if her babies don’t breathe quickly enough she fearfully rubs their feet until their deep breath brings her own deep breath. When her children are small she watches, touches their chest. When anyone she loves is asleep, she watches. Even when the little dog is asleep in the bed next to her and waits too long to breathe, she gently shakes it to breathe.
One person did better. My sister, Elaine, was living with us that winter while her husband was away with the Army, and she was expecting a baby of her own. She had been scared watching the crisis on the table. That night the two of us stayed at our brother’s house with his wife, Nancy. We slept in a cold downstairs bedroom, and Elaine held me until we both fell asleep. A few years ago we talked about that night for the first time.
She is the one who noticed me.
There is a moment in Mark’s Gospel who a blind man, Bartimaeus, is calling out at the roadside, and Jesus stops and asks him what he wants done for him. It is obvious what he wants. Everyone in the road can see it. Jesus asks anyway. (Mark 10:46-52)
Being asked is not a step on the way to being helped — it is part of the help. It is what tells a person she is a someone and not a situation.
If you are raising a child alongside a sibling who needs everything, this is the smallest and most useful thing I know: after the emergency is over, go and find the other one. Do not thank her. Ask her. Let her know she does not have to be ok.
Jesus, You asked before You healed. Teach us to ask — of the quiet ones, the capable ones, the ones who never seem to need a thing. And give them the courage to answer. Amen.
Next time: my mother’s answer to the question nobody could answer.
