Faith in the Journey. Michael Cohen

      1

      I am in a hospital bed, lying down and listening to the world around me. For the moment, I am alone but at peace. I feel the world as it goes on, yet I know my world is at a standstill. Lying on a hospital bed has a way of making people think. For me, I am thinking about the past and the future. When I think about the past, it’s the journey I took to get here. When I think about the future, it’s where my family is, well, where they will be. Will I be there, sitting on the porch, sipping sweet tea, or will I be in the ground, with my family? But I don’t face this question alone. I face it with my wife. She has been the reason I fight for the future. She is my faith, she is my love, she is my heart. It matters too much for me to quit, to lose faith. I can hear her voice, even from a distance. Even in my older age, my ears can hear her. I can hear her like when we first met in high school. She talks about my surgery, about how it’s going to go. The sounds of kids is heard also. They ask for their dad, and my wife tells them soon they will see me. I think about all my love to them. I think about all the love I have.

      There was a time I knew nothing of love. It was a time I saw only my future, and nothing more. As my mind wonders more about the past, I see the door open up. It was open but only a crack so I could hear everything. The one who walks in is my wife. I look at her brown hair that was recently cut to shoulder-length. Her smile lights up my face, something I understood she could only do. Her face was something I fell in love many years ago, but I fall in love with it every day. Her eyes was what had me. They are a special gray color. When I first met her, I found myself lost in her eyes. I never wanted to let go of her, my wife. She sits down with me, checking up on me. Waiting for this surgery was a pain in my butt, and she knew it was bothering me. But with her, I had the patience. “I love you, Jana,” I said. She smiled, which melted me again, and kissed on the cheek.

      “I love you, Mike,” she said back. Just as we started to talk about the kids wanting to see me, the doctor puts his head in for a moment.

      He had this to say, “Almost ready for you, Mike. Are you ready for this?”

      I shook nodded yes. I’ve been waiting for this since it happened many years ago. Jana pulls out the phone, and we play a song. It’s a special song, one of two that spoke our love for each other. “Thousand Years” by Pandora started play. It was song that spoke to us in the way of our love. It also made me think about the story of our faith in love. The journey of our faith, or as I called it Faith in the Journey.

      * * * * *

      I am Michael Williams. I was born in a small town called Barnegat, New Jersey. My birth was a bit early, one that took the surprise of my mom. I was born seven weeks early due to an issue with my heart. It was a minor thing, but at that time, doctors were a bit worried how I would be born. So they did the safe thing and did a C-section. I came out of the hospital a week early than expected, but then I was crying and fussy as any baby. My parents joked that loved the hospital, for I was quiet, but at home, I was always crying. Something about a small town, people take care of others. When I came home, the neighbors helped out with watching me if my mom needed sleep, which she did. We had Linda who lived next door. The neighborhood knew her because of her dark black glasses and very pink hairstyle. Linda was an older woman, around her late fifties, but she was always full of energy.

      Linda would always come on by, especially when I was born. She became my parents’ best friend. There were others who helped like Rich and Phil. They helped in the beginning but slowly faded away from the picture. Nope, we had Linda, and that was good enough for me. Linda was there for us when my mom passed. My mom was driving home one night from her job as a hospice nurse. She travels to homes in the more remote parts of the area. In some of those roads, there are no streetlights. One of those nights, a deer jumped right out from the woods. My mom tried to avoid it, but she end up driving into a tree. When the cops got there, she was already gone, along with the deer that my mom had hit right to the tree. It was a sobering moment, as the cops would say. I was only four when that happened. I didn’t understand the thing of death or that I would not see my mom again. It broke my dad’s heart. My dad was strong in these times. He rarely showed his emotions, or at least he held it for me. It was a challenge to know that he wanted to cry and grieve, but he didn’t want his son to see him. It would be years later that we talked about how he was then and now. My dad was a traveling insurance sales agent. Well, he was.

      When mom died, he took a desk job instead. That worked out; for the money, it was good, for the time, it was still long hours. That is when Linda was the biggest help for us. I got to learn more about her, how she was a strict mom but loosed up over the years. The pink hair was a dare with a friend. She liked it, so she kept the look. Linda loved to cook. She came on by with something, usually a lasagna or something Italian. It was her thing, and no one would argue with her about free food. When I was a bit old enough, my dad took me to a daycare, in part to help Linda and ’cause it was next door to his job.

      Once a week, Dad would take me out to lunch, and we always went to White Castle. I know, it’s a burger that is a small square with onions, but I loved that place.

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