The Longest Hallway - A tribute to Mom (July 2002)

[Mike DaRoza]

The agonizing walk down that long hallway last Saturday night, in some ways, reminded me of the time I was in Lakeland covering the Boys Basketball Florida Finals a few years back.
It was just moments after Santa Fe had lost the state semifinal game to Sebring, and I was among the reporters outside the Raider locker room waiting for a group of players to come out for the post-game press conference.
The Raider locker room, as much I could tell through each opening and closing of the door, was filled with teary-eyed red faces and total silence.
As the handful of players finally summoned the strength to come out, we all walked down a long and winding hallway in the Lakeland Center leading to the pressroom.
Like the walk I took last Saturday night, the bright lighting in the hallway was almost unbearable to irritated eyes, and most everyone was sobbing from the loss.
Unlike that walk in the Lakeland Center, however, the loss my family and I were feeling last Saturday night won’t go away with the coming of a new season.
No, the long hallway we were being forced to walk was in the Critical Care Unit on the third floor of the North Florida Regional Medical Center.
At the end of that walk, and the inevitable bad news from the neurologist, we all knew we were all about to suffer one of our worst losses ever.
But instead of a game, we were losing my mother to a sudden stroke that nobody saw coming.
The morning started out with a phone call that, at first, seemed harmless enough.
So like we’ve done for other loved ones before, we all headed for the hospital to lend our support.
I was among the first, of what would grow to be about 30 of my mother’s closest family and friends that eventually camped out in the lobby of the hospital that day, to arrive in the emergency room where Mom was initially stationed.
When I first saw her, I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. But I have to admit that I had seen her, myself and many others in much worse condition before, or so I thought.
She told me she was tired, cold and not in pain — just not feeling good.
I told her everything would be okay, and she drifted off to sleep.
Being the family’s resident optimist, I told everyone that it wasn’t that serious and that everything would be okay in a short time.
But as the minutes and then the hours ticked by, my optimism slipped into denial as my mother’s condition spiraled rapidly throughout the day.
Along the way, my family and I would ride a swirl of emotions that ebbed and flowed as frequently as we visited “room number two” in the third-floor CCU.
One minute we were laughing and carrying on like we had just pushed away from a Thanksgiving Day dinner at Mom’s, and the next, we were welling up like little babies needing their mom.
We all pulled strength from each other during 14 hours of one of the worst days of our lives.
But we were there…together.
After a day full of bad news that never seemed to get better and visits to the chapel, we headed for the third floor when the neurologist requested a family meeting.
As fast as the elevator could carry us, we gathered outside my mother’s door, half waiting for the doctor to come out, and half wishing he would never come out with the news we already had a feeling he was about to deliver.
His eyes grew wide when he saw all of us; you could read it all over his weary face that he couldn’t talk to us right there.
And that’s when we started the walk down that hallway.
Some of us didn’t want to go, some of us had to go, and I think all of us knew why.
Suddenly, a hallway that was level before, was now uphill and tough to maneuver through a maze of obstacles and memories of Mom.
Within an hour, she was gone and all I could think of was why I didn’t say more to her when I first arrived that day.
We all felt like we had failed in telling her the things one would say when telling their mother goodbye.
But, when reality mercifully set in and we knew we could have never expected to be making that long walk down that hallway, I think and I hope we realized we had done all we could.
We had loved her while she was here, and no matter how long the hallway, we always will.
My intentions for sharing this personal story aren’t to spread sadness or garner sympathy during this tragic time in my family’s life.
It is just my hope that by hearing it you won’t wait until you’re walking that hallway before you realize that every moment we are here, together, is precious.
I can assure you that I won’t.