The Prayers Left Behind

© Willem Havenaar / Shutterstock.com

I sit here waiting for you to come home. I have been sitting for a very long time now. Years maybe. Centuries. Or perhaps it is only days. It feels like centuries.

I cannot move from this chair. I am stuck to it, a human limpet on a plastic rock. People are very kind to me, bringing me cups of tea and sandwiches, but the tea goes cold in the cup and the sandwiches remain unopened.

I keep seeing you lifeless on the ground, the ambulance officers leaning over you, pumping your chest, forcing air into your lungs. You came back to us, pale and weak, so they whisked you away to the hospital before you left again.

A woman touched my arm and said, “We'll pray for him.”

At the hospital, the doctors and nurses worked to save you. Or so I'm told. I have no reason to believe it is not true. By the time I arrived, you were in the operating theatre and I could not see you.

So unfair. I really needed to see you.

Instead, I sat in the waiting room. Its garish light added to the nightmarish quality of the situation. I kept on hoping I'd wake up to find this was all a dream. Hackneyed, I know. Yet I am convinced that people really think that way. I certainly did.

A priest sat beside me, touched my arm and said, “Shall we pray for him?”

We prayed. I was sure God was not listening. I was right.

When the doctor came out to see me, he didn't have to say a word. I knew. The composed expression on his face, the defeated walk masked by a practiced posturing. I fell to the floor and bawled as I had never bawled - inhuman, animal, wretched.

I will never see you again, except in photos, or in your coffin, if I dare to look. But there will be nothing there of you. All the prayers in the world will not bring you back.

Now there are only the prayers left behind. 

Inspired by a prompt from Cynthia Morris in her quarterly Free Write Fling.