Beep... Beep... Beep

He sat beside her bed holding her hand, stroking it gently as she laid there motionless, still, unconcious and barely hanging on.

She was alive, yes, but barely.

He'd been sitting there by her bed for hours now, though he couldn't have said how long. He'd lost count long before and the hours had seemed endless no matter how he'd tried to spend them. The doctors and nurses would come and go, whispering words of comfort into the eerie calm of the quiet morning and doing their best to offer what little support or prayer they could... but no matter how many words they said or how hard they tried, they hadn't felt the pain he'd felt. They couldn't feel what he was going through.

He'd refused to leave her side, not wanting to risk being gone when she returned to him... or worse... when she decided it was time to head on to another life.

The steady beeping of the monitors in the room and the machine-like breathing sound of the ventilator had worked him into a near trance and he briefly shut his eyes. He was hopeful for rest. He was hopeful for some small bit of solice.

His whole life lay in this hospital bed, attached to monitors and hanging onto to the last shred of existance by a mere thread. She had tubes running in and out of her body. Her arms and legs, her throat, her hand... even a tube that went through her nose and down into her stomach to relieve some of the pressure on her swollen abdomen. These tubes kept her alive, true. They helped her breathe and eased her discomfort... at least that's what the doctors had said... but they just made him feel uneasy and nauseaous.

And then there was this. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he wanted to keep his mind away from all of it, his thoughts continuously raced back to that phonecall;

"May I speak to Mr. Mark Grant?" The calm male voice had asked that evening in a seemingly innocent manner. That voice that he would now never forget... or what that phonecall would mean.

"There's been an accident Mr Grant."

The words still haunted his mind, repeating themselves over and over, again and again. That voice had delivered the worst news that any parent could never wish to hear.

He'd rushed to the hospital late that night and had been forced to wait for hours there in the awkwardness of the emergency room waiting room before they'd finally allowed him to see her.

"It doesn't look good," he'd been told by at least one doctor... probably several... he'd lost count.

That phrase along with the words 'brain damage' and 'she may never wake up' were the only things he'd really absorbed in the past 72 hours. They'd encouraged him get some sleep... they'd tried to get him to eat, they'd even pled with him to call family members and friends to come sit with him while he waited... waited for what? For life? For death? For something in between?

How can you just sit and wait for any of those things.

He couldn't bring himself to tell them that Lauren was it. She was the last and only good thing he had left in his life. She WAS his life. His wife had died when Lauren was only a child and he'd never found it in his heart to love another woman. The only love he'd ever known since then had been his daughter.

When they'd finally allowed him to see her hours after she'd arrived at the hospital, hours after he'd arrived at the hospital... his heart nearly broke at the site of her mangled body.

She was there in the bed, but she was not. That was not his daughter, that could not be her... bruised and bleeding, swollen and lifeless. Her entire body was covered by blankets (he later learned to help alleviate the shock on him). The injuries to her arms and legs were horrid... the stitches it had taken to sew up the cuts were countless.

He opened his eyes again and looked down at her face. Her eyes were still swollen shut, her head was wrapped tightly in an oversized bandage. The doctor had informed him that her head took most of the force of impact and that the damage on the inside was far worse than the damage on the outside. This a fact that he couldn't or didn't want to imagine. He reached up and gently caressed her cheek watching for the slightest sign of life... a smile, a wince, a tear. Nothing. He knew in his heart she was already gone... gone far away from this life, from this world, from his safe and loving arms. He hoped that at least wherever she was she couldn't feel any pain. He hoped at least she was with her mother now.

He'd held onto hope as long as he possibly could. They all had. But now he knew it was time to let go. The doctors had found her driver's license in her purse, the orange sticker on the back clearly visible to anyone who dared take notice. The doctors had approached him cautiously that morning and asked his permission to donate her organs. He'd signed the papers in a state of shock and sorrow only grateful for the fact that they'd discussed this beforehand, because now he could say with certainty that this was what she would have wanted.

"Maybe," she'd said one day not all that long before, completely out of the blue, "maybe if someone, somewhere had thought a little more about that decision... thought a little harder... maybe then my mother would still be alive."

And that was that. They hadn't talked about his wife, her mother often but she knew why she'd died. That was something he'd always been honest with her about. Her mom had needed a heart transplant in order to survive. She never received her miracle.

"Maybe," he whispered to her as he layed his head on the bed next to her nearly lifeless body, "maybe you're meant to be someone's miracle..."