9/11: A Short Story

I stared at her unmoving body as we entered the room. She was passed out and peacefully lying in the hospital bed. What I noticed right away was the fact that her appendages and face were very swollen and discolored. Otherwise, she still looked the same with her curly and short cut, white hair. Machines surrounded her bed and crowded up the space of the room. They made a lot of noise and I avoided them for fear of accidentally tampering with them. However, I noticed how they added some weight to the situation. Scanning them over, I realized just how much the hospital had to do to keep her alive.
My mother and brother were with me, taking it all in themselves. My brother was 10 and not a very serious person. I didn’t think it would affect him very much. My mother was a different story. She was about to lose her last living parent, the one she was close to, and although I couldn’t see it physically, I know her heart broke into billions of pieces at the sight. My grandmother, who had turned 88 less than a month before, was diagnosed with pancreatitis not even a week before and was now going to be taken off life support. Several of her organs had failed already, including her kidneys, so my aunt had been forced to make the hardest decision of her life.

We lived all the way across the state, so this was the first time we had gotten to visit her in the hospital. While we were there by ourselves, my grandmother’s nurse, Genevieve, came in and introduced herself. She filled us in with all the details about my grandmother’s condition, and even announced our presence to my grandmother whom Genevieve said would most likely be able to hear us if we talked to her. I noticed how Genevieve talked like my grandmother was going to wake up, but I think that she was just being