The Unanswerable Questions of a Hospital Waiting Room!!

 A movie found me yesterday. It was called “Waiting,” and it tells the story of two strangers connected by the shared, silent anxiety of a hospital waiting room. With their spouses in critical condition, their conversations drift into the deep, unanswerable questions of life, forcing them—and me—to confront one of life’s most difficult questions: what does it mean to truly love someone at the end?

The film’s quiet intensity was a mirror, reflecting a period in my life that I can never forget. In the space of just one month, my world was upended by loss. First, it was my father. The memory is still sharp: watching him suffer through a long night as we frantically searched for a hospital bed. Once he was admitted, the pandemic built a wall between us. Our only connection was a video call. In our last call, he looked serene, almost smiling in his sleep. Was it the medicine that eased his pain, a pain he couldn't hide when we were by his side? I hold onto that image of peace, a stark contrast to the helplessness we felt.

A month later, grief visited again. My father-in-law, a doctor and my father’s old classmate, was in the ICU. We rushed to see him one last time, but we were too late. A doctor met us in the waiting area with the news. When we stepped inside his room, a machine was still breathing for him. His chest rose and fell in a steady, mechanical rhythm. “He is gone,” the doctor said softly, gesturing to the flat lines on the monitor. “We just haven’t turned off the ventilator.”

It was a chilling sight, one a friend had described to me when her husband was terminally ill. She spoke of the moment her brother had to explain that it was time to let him go, that keeping the machines on was no longer an act of hope, but a delay of the inevitable.

How does one make that choice? Your heart, full of emotion and memory, screams to hold on. Your brain, the seat of logic, whispers that it’s time to let go. The film captures this internal war perfectly through its characters. It shows that in the face of such a decision, logic feels like a betrayal, and emotion feels like an impossible burden.

Watching that movie, I realized that some of life’s greatest lessons come from these moments of powerlessness. They remind you that despite all we learn and all we think we know, we are often just beginners, struggling to keep pace with a world that changes in the beat of a heart.