The Miracle Bus to Hospice

May, 2003, me: age 33; mom: age 53

I can picture her. I’m sure it was sunny. I can see her looking down to know just where to place her feet to step up onto the bus just as her arm was reaching up to grasp onto the rail. I can picture her looking up into the bus driver’s face, certainly looking drawn, beyond weary, somehow pale and yellow at the same time, with difficulty breathing. The bus driver’s face would be bent with worried lines and questions, waiting for my mom to speak.
And she would say, “take me to Hospice.”

They said that’s what she did. The social worker that I spoke with at Hospice said that somehow she’d had the strength and the wherewithal to get on the city bus and request to be taken to Hospice. Which the bus driver did.

I don’t know if it was the correct bus or route; I highly doubt that it was. My mom was mostly incohernet even in her sober states at this point, so to be three days from death and have the Houston bus schedule straight as well as to wait on the correct bus, physically, seems even more of a miracle than I can fathom. But I can fathom the good heart of a bus driver who must’ve known the situation was dire.