When the fever hit 102, I started bargaining with God.
We’d made it seven months into lockdown without getting sick. I was working from home, Mom had moved into our guest room, and we did everything right—wiped groceries, masked indoors, kept windows open. But the virus didn’t care. One morning, she couldn’t smell her coffee. By nightfall, she was coughing and I was calling the doctor.
They told me not to bring her in unless her oxygen dropped below 90. “Manage it at home if you can,” the nurse said. I remember thinking how cruel that sentence was. Manage it.
Like it was a package, not my mother.
We had one thermometer, one pulse oximeter, and no idea what we were doing. I slept in a chair outside her room, checking her stats every hour, counting her breaths, memorizing every creak in the floorboards. She asked me once, “Why do you look so scared?” I told her I wasn’t.
I lied.
On the third night, she started talking in her sleep. Sometimes it was Spanish, sometimes English. Sometimes it was my father’s name—he’d been gone ten years. She sang hymns, too. Old ones. Ones I hadn’t heard since childhood. Her voice was thin, but the melody was still there.
“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine…”
I sat there with the thermometer in one hand and tears in the other.
I don’t know if prayer changed anything, but her fever broke on the fifth day. The color came back to her cheeks, and she finally asked for toast. I brought it on a chipped saucer from her wedding set, just to make it feel like a ritual. She said it tasted like cardboard. I wept with relief.
She survived.
We both did.
Three years later, I still keep the pulse oximeter in my desk drawer. And every so often, I hear that hymn again—on the radio, in a dream, sometimes in her humming as she waters the plants.
I don’t think I saved her. But I kept vigil. I bore witness. I stayed.
There’s a kind of love that doesn’t roar or swoon. It stands at the door with a thermometer and refuses to let go.