It was like a scene from a movie. Shortly after our friends had pulled up, the department’s black cars pulled into my driveway as police command staff and city of San Jose council members made their way inside, to console the new widow.
But all I wanted to do was get the heck out of there and get to Mike.
I was finally escorted to the hospital and was walked through a silent sea of officers, all lined up from the parking lot to the hospital doors. Many with their heads hung down, most with tears in their eyes. All there to honor Mike and show me their support. Those officers stood there for hours. Hundreds of them.
I remember every detail about walking into the side door of the hospital and through the corridor to the hospital room.
It was like time stood still.
As I entered, the room went silent. Doctors and nurses stopped working.
I remember thinking, why are so many people already here? I looked around and saw several officers with their heads down, a few friends and family members crying and consoling one another.
I wasn’t crying yet. I was in shock.
Only a curtain separated me from my husband. I couldn’t bear to walk through that curtain.
I finally did, stumbling down onto the hard, cold hospital floor. I sobbed in that room, in front all those people surrounding my husband and I, for what felt like forever.
I just wanted everyone to go away so I could be with Mike. But more and more people kept entering the room, people who knew and loved Mike and me.
I kept thinking he would just wake up and take me home, but he was already gone. Already received his new body in heaven, yet, he was right there in front of me.
I couldn’t stay with him long and hated that I had to leave him. I was the last to arrive but the first to leave. I knew I had to get to my boys before the media did. Mike’s name was being released on the eight o’clock news and there was no way our boys were going to have their lives ruined by anyone other than me.
