Holding the Woman Who is Falling by Denise Osso

The woman on the folding chair in front of me is falling. 

When she slumps over, I scoot my chair forward, reach out, grab her tiny bird bone shoulders. I wrap my arms around her to keep her from hitting the floor. Her fluffy white corona of hair brushes my cheek.

We are in a church parish hall in Beverly Hills, California at a lunchtime Al-anon meeting. It is always packed. You have to show up early to get a seat in one of two large concentric circles of folding chairs. This is where people who have everything – including a family member who they can’t help or change or fix – come here to learn how to live with the truth that they are powerless. As they say in the program, there is a lot of recovery in this room.

The women I am holding is unconscious. She wears Eileen Fisher separates and looks like she has done yoga for decades. A lifetime of anniversary gifts sparkle on her arthritic fingers and her age-dark wrists. As people notice what is happening, a ripple of concern spreads around the circles and the leader stops the meeting.

“Somebody please call 9-1-1,” she says. “Everyone needs to back up and give her air.” People scoot back. “You stay put,” she says to me. 

The paramedics arrive within minutes. The first two look like surfers who still haven’t decided on their major at U.C. Santa Barbara. They pop open a portable gurney as they roll in. They are followed by a middle-aged man who carries a duffle bag with a white cross on it. He wears a headset and has just enough gray in his hair to be cast as the older guy in a police procedural. The three of them are a camera-ready swat team. They get right to work.

The senior guy squats down to look at the woman I am holding as the two surfers bring the gurney in closer. One of them taps me on the shoulder and smiles. I smile back but I don’t let go. He gently takes one of my arms and lifts it up and away from the woman. Now they can ease her onto the gurney. Now I can sit back. She opens her eyes.

 “I just fainted,” she says as the older guy takes her vitals. “I feel fine.”

“You are terrific, ma’am,” he says. “We’ll go to Cedars – just to be sure.”

She gives someone her husband’s number so they can call him and tell him to meet her at the hospital. The men glide her out the door in slow motion, just like on TV. The silent room erupts in applause. And then it’s over.

People pull their chairs back into place and get ready to share the stories they came here to tell. I raise my hand and the leader calls on me. 

“What just happened was really hard for me,” I say and my eyes fill with tears. “By the time my mother had a stroke, she had stopped drinking, but she was a practicing alcoholic for decades. So was my father. I tried to help her, but I couldn’t. I had to let go.” By this time I am crying too hard to continue. Someone hands me a tissue. Someone gives me a bottle of water. Then, everybody just lets me be. The meeting goes on and other people share. When it ends, I walk to my car and go back to the office.

I work at a non-profit. Like most, it is staffed by people who believe in a cause and are willing to work for less money in order to feel like they can make a difference. Some leave the minute they realize that there is no end to the self-sacrifice. Most stay on for their families or for as long as they have to. Naturally, as the adult child of two fall-down drunks, I feel right at home. In fact, the more overwhelming things get, the more determined I become to endure them.

The first time I flashback, I am in a senior staff meeting. The topic is how to fix a problem we can’t control but for which we are held accountable. Like everyone else at the conference table, I try to look interested. But I am busy chastising myself for wearing a skirt that day. It is the middle of July and the air conditioning is set to keep men in suits and ties comfortable. My bare legs are freezing. I tuck my skirt under my thighs, button up my boss lady jacket and hold my arms tightly around myself.

My body is at that table, but in my mind, I am in the parish hall, holding my arms around the woman who is falling. I am barking orders like a drill sergeant. This time, there are no paramedics. This time, it is up to me to save the day.

“You two open the windows,” I yell. “Everybody else, step back and give her air. Call the paramedics. Find her phone and call her husband. Somebody get some ice.” 

Back in the conference room, someone has asked me a question and I don’t respond. They ask again and when the woman next to me puts her hand on my arm, I snap back to see every face around the table turned towards me. I don’t remember what I said. I talk my way out of it. Then it happens again a month later. 

This time, I am stuck in traffic on Laurel Canyon in the middle of my nightly commute, during which it takes me an hour to travel twelve miles. Somebody on NPR says something that sets me off and suddenly, I am back in the parish hall, shouting orders. This time, I only need single words. But I can’t stop saying them.

“Windows! Air! Paramedics! Phone! Ice! Windows! Air! Paramedics! Phone! Ice!”

It is August in L.A. and my car windows are open. Traffic is at a standstill and people in the other cars can hear me shouting. 

“Windows! Air! Paramedics! Phone! Ice!”

Somebody honks and I realize that the car in front has moved on and I have not. My arms are wrapped around the steering wheel. I need to pull over. But when you are on a two-lane mountain road you keep going. I start moving and cry all the way to the Valley.

The last time it happens, I am floating in our pool. It is a Sunday afternoon in late September, when the weather always gets hot before fall. I am not thinking of the meetings I will have the next day or the emails I will get tonight. My phone is on the towel by the steps. It has not rung, but if it does, I will be able to answer. My head is on my arms which are wrapped around a kickboard. My eyes are closed and my body is suspended in the blue green water. I am almost asleep. When I drift into the deep end, the kickboard bumps into the tiled pool wall. I slip off and start to go under, then reach up, grab for the kickboard and yell until my mouth tastes like chlorine.  

I am holding the woman who is falling. Barking orders at people I only know by their first names, but whose stories are just like mine. Yelling the words as fast as I can because there is never enough time to say what I have to say.

That it is too much. That I can’t do it anymore. That I have to let go. 

Denise Osso’s essays and short stories have been featured in pigeonpagesnyc.com and The Los Angeles New Fiction Emerging Writer Series. Flight Plan: A Fable received a 2019 Craft Short Fiction Prize Honorable Mention. She is a Tin House Summer Workshop graduate and a fellow of the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

26 May 2022