This is how timidly and orphaned my mother moved into a tiny room in an old house opposite the hospital where relatives of cancer patients live, so that she could run to the intensive care unit several times a day.

Shy and orphaned… as if they had never lived in a big house. 

Just beyond the park stands a temple, as if it was put there on purpose to keep hope alive. In the evening and morning, the service begins and the bells ring – muffled, without strain, reminding us that there are things that words cannot explain. There are things that are bigger than us.

I saw the temple in the window and thought, “It’s good that mom is a believer. Faith helps with grief.” 

I even wanted to thank someone for this apartment, which, as if on purpose, was chosen in such a corner of the building, where all the windows overlook the temple. 

I kept mentally thanking and thanking someone, and then I realized that I was actually thanking God. 

Mom put her things on the floor and went straight back to the hospital. She put on a thin sweater, I insisted she wear a coat. 

It was fall when Mom went to see Dad at the hospital (for a couple of days we thought). She hadn’t been outside for months, having been in a quarantined area, and when she did go out, she found herself in the middle of winter. 

I asked that she be sure to write when she came back to this apartment after the hospital – alone, at night, without a coat… She wouldn’t let us stay with her.

My mom called from the ICU, calmly saying that she was with my dad now: sitting next to him in a chair and holding his hand. She said that he was sleeping, that all his organs were “fine”, which meant that they were not functioning on their own and that the machines were working for them. He is no longer breathing on his own, the ventilator is breathing for him.

She came back at 9pm and texted us, “Kostya is still sleeping.”

That means he’s in a coma and he can’t wake up. It means he may never wake up again. It means he probably won’t wake up.

I imagined scenes from movies where the hero is in a coma and when someone close to him comes to visit, he opens his eyes and regains consciousness. Suddenly, if I come again… suddenly, if the grandchildren come…..

Life is not a movie. There’s no justice, period. You can’t close your eyes, you can’t run out of the theater. You have to sit through the whole thing.

“All is well… Kostya is still asleep,” Mom wrote. So tenderly and lovingly, so caringly, as if he had returned after a long trip, and she wrapped him with a blanket tucked under his sides, carefully closed the door and told us:

– Shh, girls. Daddy’s sleeping.

Daddy’s sleeping.