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She knew the minute she stepped off the elevator there was something different today. The quietness of the nursing home was unusual and she felt sadness in the air. She went straight to his room as she usually did but he wasn't there. She sat the things down she had brought for him and went to the nurse's desk to find out if they had seen him. Angie, the nurse that she had become friends with over the last several years was standing there with tears in her eyes and just pointed to another room. Kev's room.
Kev was a man she had met only a few months before. He had returned home from Desert Storm with no problems until he got home. He started to get sick and come down with ailments. Some had still never diagnosed. They had no idea what he had that was making him sick. Each time she went to visit, she always stopped in to see him. He called her Ready. This started as a joke, she remembers. He said to her one day, "Hey beautiful, you want to run away with me?" and she said "Sure, I'm Ready." As time went on and they got to know each other, she would call him a couple times during the week just to check up on him and their friendship grew. She never missed a chance to visit with him when she went to the nursing home, and even introduced him to the man she was there to see originally. The two of them became good friends. A bonding between a Vietnam Vet and a Desert Storm Vet. A bonding between two men who both knew their time on earth wasn't going to be much longer.
She walked into the room and the man she had come to see was sitting by the bed holding Kev's hand. There were tears in his eyes as she leaned down to give him a kiss on the cheek. He whispered "Kev's parents have been called." She walked around the other side of the bed looking down at the young man who no longer resembled the picture of himself in uniform, that sat on his nightstand. She picked up his hand and smoothed back the hair with her other hand. His eyes opened and through cracked and dried lips he whispered, "I'm Ready". She laughed softly and said, "I think you are confused, Kev, I'm Ready. " He shook his head and said "No, this time I am ready. I have had enough of the pain. Enough of being trapped in a bed. I am just ready to go. Would you say a prayer for me?" She stood there, her eyes filled with tears, she was not ready to let her friend go. She wasn't ready to say good-bye, and yet she knew in her heart that she couldn't want him here either, not in the shape he was in. She reached down and kissed his forehead and looked deep into his eyes and said "Are you sure Kev?" He nodded his head. She closed her eyes and said, "Please, God, be merciful. Please give Kev what he needs. Amen" She couldn't pray to let him live, she couldn't pray for him to die. She knew she had to turn it over to God and accept what happened.
Minutes later, Kev's parents showed up, so she took the handles of the wheelchair and pushed him back to his room. There they talked of Kev and of his dying. He told her he wasn't ready to die. She just nodded and said "Apparently God isn't ready for you to die yet either." About a half an hour later, Angie came in the room to tell them Kev had passed away. She got him settled in bed and they brought him in a sedative. When he was asleep, she stood there and looked down at him with tears in her eyes. Someday, they would be telling her the same thing about him.
On her drive back home, she thought about the friendship that she had built with Kev. She didn't question why God had brought him into her life, just grateful for the short time they had together. She thought about the year they sent her son to Iraq, barely 19 yrs old. She remembers how she shut herself off from the world then. She went to school, she went to work, and she watched the news of the war and cried. In that year, her marriage went down the drain, and she didn't even notice. She was so focused on her son and her feeling that she just knew he was never coming home. She remembers Thanksgiving weekend when they announced a boy from Minnesota had been killed and they were not going to release his name until family was notified. The horror of that weekend waiting for the phone call or the knock on the door, just knowing it was about her son. The relief she felt when he called her that Sunday night to tell her he was okay and that it was his best friend who died. Through all that she remembers that never once had she ever thought how she would feel if something happened to him. Today she got a glimpse.........
