Waiting

May 29, 2025

I want to tell you that your toilet habit fame lives on. Today I went to physical therapy at Movement for Life in Candler. I arrived early and headed straight to the restroom—only to find it occupied.

I waited for a bit. Then I realized I was in the way, awkwardly milling about to avoid people as they moved through their exercises. As I stood there, waiting, I thought of you—and of how fucking long you always took in the bathroom. It was a joke with everyone who knew you.

How many times I had to plan our schedule around your toileting so it wouldn’t interfere with therapy, scans or appointments. How often did I stand outside of bathroom doors at roadside restrooms and medical facilities with people lining up while you did whatever it was you did in there for thirty minutes at a time?

I was flooded with a mash up of memories and emotions.

Why did you take so long?
Why was I so impatient?

And then I laughed—remembering all the times I hauled you into a women’s room, or dragged us both into a men’s room, just to make it work.

Still in the way in my little corner of Movement for Life, I drifted back up front.

It was a genuine, unexpected connection when the receptionist and I cracked up about how the entire staff knew to plan for how epically long you took in the bathroom.

You are known here.
You are remembered here.

And yet—when these staff eventually move on, you will no longer be here.

Our lives became so small. We no longer went to plays, dinner with friends or family movie nights—relationships commenced with appointments and copays. And when you stop being a patient, those relationships—the ones that filled our days, that became our community—quietly dissolve.

No goodbyes.
No closure.

I wonder if this, too, is part of my grief—not seeing the therapists and doctors and nurses we spent so much of the last fifteen years with. Relationships severed without ceremony.

All I know is that I was broken for the rest of the day—simply because I had to wait for the bathroom to be free.

In a way, I’m still waiting. I’ll always be waiting.

It never occurred to me that love can look like standing outside a bathroom door.

“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”
—Joanna Macy