The Worst Day

Jason Sanchez
Nov 6 · 3 min read

We all have a worst day of our lives. I live in New York and for a lot of folks here who’ve been here for 20 years, it’s 9/11. I can’t begin to imagine how awful that day is for a lot of people, and I would only guess that the shared sadness of the day does not make up for how the attention that anniversary gets can make those old wounds fresh every year.

In the bigger picture of things, my worst day of the year is a lot smaller. It’s not 9/11/01. It’s 11/6/18, the day my mom died.

I was walking back from my voting location, MS 88, when I got a call from my brother. My mom had been in a nursing home facility for some time by that point and her health hadn’t been great in years, but she kept keeping on and I thought that would be the case for a while longer. My brother told me that the nursing home facility had moved my mom to the hospital. She was not doing well. Well, she’d been in the hospital before, and yes, I’d been scared, but I thought again that this was something she’d overcome.

I went to work and tried to carry on with my day. I was in a meeting in a conference room named Canada for some reason. We have themes here. A lot of places do this. I was talking with my colleagues about a big series that we were going to produce in Singapore. The logistics of shooting across the world in a tight timeline near the holidays was what spurred the meeting. During it, I felt my phone vibrate on a few occasions, but I couldn’t answer it. That was a mistake.

I left the meeting around 11:45 and saw the missed calls from my brother. When I returned the call, that was when I knew that this was the worst day of my life. My mom had taken a quick turn for the worse in the hospital and my brother and dad had gone over. They saw her in the last moments and while I was talking timelines and logistics and activities in Singapore we thought people would want to see in a video, my mom took her last breaths. I talked to my brother while pacing down on the ground floor lobby. As calmly as I could, I made plans to fly down to Florida to help. I came back up shaking and told my managers what had happened and that I was leaving. I sent a quick email telling some of my team where I was going and why. And then I took the longest R train ride back home and ate a giant chorizo breakfast torta from the 24 hour Mexican bakery by me and breathed short, shallow breaths and looked for flights to Florida and tried to process everything. The last call I had with her the Saturday before where she got to see my son. Telling her about my other son who was not going to be born for another 7 months or so. She was in bed. She looked frail. She always looked frail in those last days but she was excited to talk and loved seeing her grandson. The call didn’t hold my son’s attention for long and we cut it short. Life with kids means a lot of shifting and in any case, I thought I’d have quite a few more calls to make up for it. I left with I love you, like I always did.

Today is the one year anniversary of my worst day. Life goes on, which is both helpful and in a way pretty cruel. Shouldn’t it have stopped for this one life? But the best way to celebrate that life is for me to take all the sacrifices, the love, the work, everything that she did and pay it forward to my kids and build a better life. My worst day is small, right? It’s deeply personal. I hope that for all the horribleness of 11/6/18, that it remains my worst day.

Jason Sanchez

Written by

Ex-CNN, Ex-Money, Ex-Maxim???

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