All hospital waiting rooms are the same. Whether in emergency rooms, intensive care units, or those expansive areas near the front desk, each impersonal space is identical to the next. There are the cubed-shaped chairs carefully arranged around the sad TV set. The ugliest crayons in the box color the scratchy chair cushions, the pedestrian artwork, the dingy walls. Innocuous color combinations, like tan, maroon, forest green, peach, seafoam, the color pale.

The waiting room asks that you make yourself at home. It politely nudges you to read that People magazine from three years ago and nestle into the recent past. The cube-chair beckons and the wood laminate coffee table reminds you of the one in your grandmother’s house. The one she topped with crossword puzzle books and the crystal candy dish. The waiting room wants you to honor the ghost of that candy dish, the puzzle books, the years gone by in these dated magazines. It wants you to revere the ghosts of your own life, what you once were and had before you took a seat here. You must only think of the before, before, before.

You could say I’m a waiting-room expert, a reluctant authority on its place within the larger context of the healthcare-industrial complex. My mother was terminally ill, in and out of doctor’s offices, rehabilitation centers, and, of course, hospitals. Because of the time spent within them, I am deeply intimate with these spaces. How long did I wait? It’s impossible now to tally the hours spent numbing myself with daytime talk shows, wearing down each of my fingernails as I rubbed them together like kindling, witnessing the private grief of others explode in public ways while I held mine tightly in my lap.

One spring afternoon in the early ’90s, I’m plucked from school and planted in the lobby of _____ Medical Center. Due to complications from multiple sclerosis, my mother is in intensive care. The waiting room is a mauvy open area on the first floor adjacent to the front desk. I later dub this area the “Pink Lady Perch” due to the sweet volunteers who congregate there.

No one tells you this, but there’s a certain way to behave in a waiting room. I watch other family members for cues. Mostly, I watch my father. He’s a pro at this because Mom has been sick for the duration of their marriage. He understands the unspoken rules of the place. How you must act nonchalant yet express moderate concern at all times. How you must make small talk with others, both staff and other hospital visitors. How you must joke around even when the smell of sick permeates your skin. My father looks enviably at ease while eating a sack of burgers in the hushed pastels of _____ Medical Center. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then pats my leg with a forced smile. So, I stuff my face with fries, my throat clogging with tears and globs of potato. I don’t ask Dad for updates. Instead, I swallow and detach. This is called waiting.

Upstairs, Dad meets with the doctors. I wait for him, for word of my mother’s miraculous recovery, but I’m also waiting for something better to happen. Sometimes better things happen inside the sad TV—smaller, brighter worlds that resemble ones I faintly remember before spending my days here. But this is rare. In the waiting room, I am prone to gazing out the lobby window as the sun sets over the nondescript parking lot. The slow and beautiful darkening of the sky is an indication of progress that is, at once, startling and heartbreaking. I watch as the stars compete with the parking lot lights timed to safely illuminate one’s exit into the night. I watch, in awe, as if it is a whole other galaxy out there beyond the hospital’s automatic doors. In a way, it is.

Dad returns to say Mom is ready for my visit. But she’s never ready; her eyes are always closed. She would be mortified to know how we hover over her fragile form, fixing our eyes on her body as if she’s a riddle we can solve. The skin of my mother rests at the center of an ugly tangle of tubes and wires hooked up to indifferent machines. I barely recognize her apart from her hands, long, white and smooth with crimson talons that people mistake for Lee Press-Ons. I take hold of one. It is cold, clammy, and unresponsive to my touch. Yet I cherish the shape and feel of it within my tiny palm. I cling to its impression as I return to the waiting room, gripping my hand with the other as if I can keep her hand’s contours with me downstairs.

The waiting room serves its purpose: to contain me since I can’t contain myself. It forces me to sit on my thoughts, to keep my distance from the realities that occupy the other floors in the building. The waiting room marks a clear boundary between the healthy and the ailing. Most people in the waiting room are visitors. And visitors are the un-sick—the strong and the safe. When visiting hours are over, we return to our homes for a few sleepless hours, preoccupied with what tomorrow brings for those we love. As we toss and turn in our beds, we are unnerved by the knowledge that our bodies still belong to us while the bodies of our mothers, fathers, children and friends are sites of pain and disorder for others to explore and interrogate to some mysterious end.

The unwell aren’t afforded the luxury of waiting. Even those that are first admitted into the hospital via the waiting room know their stay there will be brief. Once the paperwork is complete, sick people become patients, incurring costs as soon as they’re declothed and redressed in cheap and flimsy gowns. You’re not sure how time works for them. Or rather, works against them. But it does.

The waiting room is ruthless in its deception. It mimics the tasteful quiet of a hotel lobby, but the calm it conveys is a lie. And this makes me hate the waiting room more than any other room in the hospital. The watercolors behind my head, the carpet below my feet, the soft glow of the sad TV mirrored in my eyes all conspire to keep the hospital’s biggest open secret. As they open and close, the elevator doors reveal glimpses of the truth: a gurney here, a mess of tubes there, a visitor heading directly for the exit, no longer waiting because what had come, came quickly. You see, the waiting room purposely fails to indicate that the “who” you are waiting for is actually a “what.”

This is something I figure out on my own around day four or five of alternating between nervously sitting in the lobby and keeping vigil upstairs. No matter the reason for their admittance, your mother, father, child, partner, or older relative must be somewhat stripped of their humanity to survive in this place. It’s nothing personal; it’s the way medicine works. The soul is on hold until the body is properly dealt with.

If you are to prevent physical deterioration of any kind, then you must transform the “who” into a “what.” A “person” becomes a “patient.” A list of ways this person’s body betrays her and damages her life becomes a “chart.” Doctors and nurses tend to spend more time talking about my mother than to her. This is not to say that they don’t address her with the utmost compassion and care. They do. But they mostly discuss the logistics of procedures, treatment options, timelines. They are likely to refer to her in the third person even when she’s lucid or awake. I find myself doing the same, replacing “I want you back home” with “What’s her current discharge status?”

And I learn to accept this. To combat death and disease, you must harness logic and steady yourself with science. This is what I surmised then. And in reading the news each morning, this is what I know now. In the media coverage, the “what” has clearly eclipsed the “who.” We speak about numbers and statistics rather than focus on the names and faces of those whose lives are lost to the coronavirus. Ultimately, this is how we will beat this thing, how we will survive.

But I can’t stop thinking of those who are directly impacted by the pandemic. For the families of coronavirus patients, the distance between the sick and the well is much greater and far more literal. Stringent rules are in place regarding hospital visitation as a means of protection. Families connect with their loved ones through phone calls and video chats. They anxiously wait in the cramped confines of their vehicles for updates. Some drop off their family members at hospital and ER entrances to never see them again.

Because of these new guidelines, the “who” and the “what” are conflating in unprecedented ways for hospital staff. Healthcare providers now assume the role of family and friends, remaining at bedsides as substitute caregivers. They intimately confront their patients’ mortality to be dearly reminded of their own. Doctors and nurses hold their patients’ hands while also trying to solve the riddles of their bodies.

Waiting rooms are no longer capable of disguising the truth because they don’t exist. There is no communal space for families to indulge in fleeting moments of normalcy. There is no tacky rattan furniture to lounge on while Jimmy Kimmel plays on mute. There is nowhere to gab about nothing over a cup of lukewarm coffee. There is nowhere to share vending-machine snacks with strangers in your same odd and sorrowful predicament before you return to your respective rooms down the hall wearing masks of bravery.

During this time of quarantine, our homes are the new waiting rooms. We attempt to keep the full traumatic weight of the pandemic at bay in a myriad of ways: compulsively baking, losing ourselves in remote work, and tossing and turning at night plagued by the current unknowns. We anticipate the slow reopening of our cities, our lives resuming, the possibility of better things happening. We prepare for what’s next.

And as I continue to mark time in my 800-square-foot apartment, I realize I was wrong. The waiting rooms of my past were not duplicitous. Rather, they were a gift. For a few hours each day, I could suspend time and idle in a space that offered the illusion of familiarity and solace. I could not stop for death but could briefly pause my life, pretending to savor fast food and the sad TV news. Rampant illness was cloaked in creature comforts but I was never more than a few floors away from the person I loved. Even when each and every door reopens and better things do, eventually, come, I won’t allow myself to forget this privilege.

Jillian Luft is a Florida native, current Brooklyn resident and former frequenter of hospital waiting rooms. When she’s not working as a special educator, she is writing.