If I Stay: 10:40 p.m.–2:48 a.m.

I don’t realize I’m looking for the pediatric ward until I get there.

I kept waiting for the day when he’d swat me away, say “You’re embarrassing me,” the way he does to Dad when Dad cheers too loudly at T-ball games.

If one of us should have been left behind, if one of us should be given the opportunity for more life, it should be him.

Teddy? I call. Where are you? Come back to me! But he won’t. I know it’s fruitless.

I don’t want to be in this suspended state where I can see what’s happening, where I’m aware of what I’m feeling without being able to actually feel it.

“Could be a missed blood vessel that wasn’t cauterized,” the doctor says.

Or a slow leak from a perforated bowel.

The nurses work rapidly to detach the monitors and catheters and run another tube down my throat.

In the quiet corner of the ICU I start to really think about the bitter things I’ve managed to ignore so far today. What would it be like if I stay? What would it feel like to wake up an orphan?

He was dead by the time the ambulance got there. A freak brain aneurysm.

As everyone talked about Kerry, the mood in the car was fizzy and fun, like we were going to the circus, not a funeral. But it seemed right, it seemed true to Kerry, who was always overflowing with frenetic energy.

It was horribly depressing—and not just because it was for someone who’d died tragically young and for no particular reason aside from some bad arterial luck.

And instead of having eulogies from his bandmates or the people in town who he’d spent the last fifteen years with, some uncle from Boise got up and talked about teaching Kerry how to ride a bike when he was six, like learning to ride a bike was the defining moment in Kerry’s life.

“That funeral wasn’t about celebrating Kerry’s life,” Mom growled, yanking at her scarf. “It was about repudiating it.

“I’d want Mozart’s Requiem,” I said.

When I was growing up I’d have elaborate fantasies about my funeral.

My deadbeat father and all the friends who’d wronged me would weep over my casket, which would be red, naturally, and they’d play James Taylor.

In my ideal scenario, my bighearted pushover husband and I die quickly and simultaneously when we’re ninety-two years old.

In fact, Mama Bear would be absolutely furious with the way events are unfolding today.

I wish there was some kind of anesthesia for me, or at least something to make the world shut up.

Are the doctors afraid that I’ll wake up midsurgery and be horrified by the scalpels or blood?

They call out a chorus of numbers that are as familiar to me now as my own name: BP, pulse ox, respiratory rate.

His cheeks are sallow, his skin looks gray and papery, and his eyes are bloodshot.

I’m forever cutting bangs, then growing them. It’s about as radical a makeover as I can give myself.

Gran twitters on for another five minutes, filling me in on mundane news

And listening to her now, I can almost picture us in her greenhouse, where even in winter, the air is always warm and humid and smells musty and earthy like soil with the slightest tinge of manure.

I try to meditate on the sound of Gran’s voice, to be carried away by her happy babble.

I am still not entirely clear on the particulars here, but I do know that once I fully commit to going, I’ll go.

And I’m a little scared that if I accidentally think, I wouldn’t mind an endless nap, it will happen and be irreversible, like the way my grandparents used to warn me that if I made a funny face as the clock struck noon, it would remain like that forever.

Did Mom and Dad decide? It hardly seems like there would have been time for them to make such a momentous decision, and I can’t imagine them choosing to leave me behind.

Why can’t someone else decide this for me? Why can’t I get a death proxy?

Gramps is there. He’s crying. He’s not making any noise, but tears are cascading down his cheeks, wetting his entire face.

And when the well of grief is momentarily dry, he steps forward and kisses me on the forehead.

But this is the first time today that anyone has acknowledged what I have lost.

But when, a few weeks after Teddy was born, Dad gave away his leather jacket—his prized beat-up motorcycle jacket with the fuzzy leopard belt—we finally realized that a major transformation was under way.

Dad’s other bandmates took his decision in stride, but Henry was devastated.

Strangely enough, in some ways Gramps seemed as upset with Dad’s metamorphosis as Henry had been.

I checked the liner notes to see which songs Dad had written and then I painstakingly copied down all the lyrics.

“What are you singing, Mia?” Dad asked me, catching me serenading Teddy as I pushed him around the kitchen in his stroller in a vain attempt to get him to nap.

“Mia Oh-My-Uh. I’m not giving anything up. It’s not an either-or proposition. Teaching or music. Jeans or suits. Music will always be a part of my life.”