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I am at my friend Joan’s house when get the call from my father. As 12 year olds with late night freedom, Joan and I had spent the evening engaging in our favorite activity of staying up late, watching scary movies.

My dad sounds rattled on the phone, and says, “Something happened to Bev last night. She drove herself to the hospital and found out she had a heart attack”. “Bev” is what we call our mother, my siblings and I. Rarely do we call her “Mom”, because she always refers to herself by name, and same with my dad, although we call him “Dad”.

“What?” I ask. I don’t understand. My mother is young, relatively, about 45, non smoker, vegetarian….it seems highly unlikely that my mom would have a heart attack. And drive herself to the hospital? What is that all about? Don’t you collapse and fall over when you have a heart attack? Don’t you go to the hospital in an ambulance? None of it makes any sense.

My dad repeats what he has said. It is starting to make sense, or at least sound believable.

“It was a serious heart attack, but Bev is in the hospital and they are taking good care of her. She is awake and out of pain. When you come home, we’ll go see her”. In my mind I’m picturing how my mother almost died, that’s how I’m interpreting “serious heart attack”. This is a belief I will carry with me throughout my life. I tell him I’ll be right home. I briefly tell Joan what has happened, and she asks if she should come with me. I call my dad to ask him if that’s ok, but he says it needs to just be family right now. I say ok. I walk around the block from Joan’s house to mine, worried and scared.

When I get home, my brother, Karl, and sister, Jane, are home with my dad. Everyone is standing in the dining room, and I have a memory of coming home from Joan’s earlier this year to everyone standing in the dining room when my grandmother died. It feels familiar. I hug my dad. I ask when we’re going to the hospital. He says, “Right now, we were waiting for you to come home”.

We get in the car and drive to the hospital.

When we get there, we find out where my mother is and go up to see her. In her room, the first thing I notice is that there are tubes and buttons and monitors everywhere, hooked up to my mother and monitoring what is happening to her. It scares me, to see her like that. She looks so helpless and fragile, and it contrasts with the image I’ve always had of my mother, one who is strong and independent. I am scared. I look at my brother and sister. They look scared too. Even my dad looks scared. The only one who doesn’t look scared is my mom, who is trying hard to show us she’s fine, that it “wasn’t that big of a deal”. She is friendly with the nurses and doctors, and I can tell she is one of their favorite patients. My mother, the comedian. She is well loved by all. She is trying to take care of our feelings, I know, but I find it irritating that she is pretending like nothing happened.

I want to know how long she’ll be there. When she’ll get to come home. The doctors say they don’t know, they want to watch her for observation, in case she has another one. They think it will only be a couple of days. A couple of days? Alone with my dad and without my mom for a couple of days, maybe more? I am not happy.

We leave the hospital and go home. My Aunt Barbara, my namesake, is there. She, like my mother, is pretending like nothing happened, but I can see how flustered she is. Again, I am annoyed. It speaks to how my family deals with things, pretending like they didn’t happen. This is something I am just beginning to be aware of.