I hold my breath, I try to think of something else. The doctor says it’s not pain, only pressure.
“You’re going to feel a lot of pressure…”
And I'm thinking about when I stayed in the hospital with my grandfather. I met his nurses and doctors.
In that hospital room I made up songs and drew pictures. The hospital smell clung to my clothes. And seeped into my skin.
It was in these moments, I told my grandfather not to die. With the sincere honesty of a child I told him,
“You can’t die, not yet, you have to wait until I do something great.”
And with a gesture I didn’t fully understand, he held my hand and smiled.
That complete acceptance, it’s rare.
This is pain, the agony and finality of loss.
He had grown up during the depression. He began working when he was 6 years old selling newspapers and roofing. His father had left his mother with 7 children. He survived 2 wars. When my mom told him she was thinking of adopting a baby, he looked at her and said, "Bring her home."
For 6 months I had no name.
The nurses called me “The Little Princess”. The doctors didn’t think I would survive.
Don’t waste a name on something that won’t live.
I was the princess of a kingdom of the weak and the wounded.
The heiress to a fortune of misfortune.
My lungs breathed in spite of, my heart pumped in urgency.
They tell me, that when he saw me for the first time, he held picked up my hand and said,
“She’s got a lot of growing to do.”
There are many things that are incomplete and eroded in my memories.
He named me Lola, because I was too small for a longer name.
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