In the ICU at Robert Wood Johnson

We’ve just been told her kidneys and liver are shutting down. She cries out for our dead mother.
I want to take her hand the way I did when she caught her leg in a bicycle wheel. I was in high
school and she was just entering kindergarten. I held her head in my lap across the bathroom
counter as the doctor stitched up her knee. I want to take her hand now, but I’m not wearing
gloves and she’s immunocompromised by another disease she’s grappling with. Her son, her
only child, came to New Brunswick from Long Island. I told him on the phone he’d better. I’ve
only been in the hospital to give birth. She, my baby sister, has had meningitis, all kinds of
orthopedic surgeries, cancer surgery, and now this. She’ll pull through, because she always does.
Because she refuses to accept the bad stuff. She mobilizes in a crisis like when our mother’s
house was burgled. She came right away and kept us all sane. Like when our middle sister’s
husband had a heart attack during dinner at Applebee’s and she dropped everything, bought
a cheesecake, and came to the hospital. Stayed with our sister for days. Wrote and delivered the
eulogy the way she did for both our parents. And now here she is, under the white sheets,
mumbling in Yiddish to our dead mother. I want to hold her hand, but I don’t have her strength.

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based writer whose work about chronic illness and disability has appeared in FLARE Magazine, Calendula Review, Argyle Literary Magazine, Journal of Expressive Writing, Laurel Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, and elsewhere..