I’ve been off the grid for a while. It had been due to mundane, everyday reasons.

But now it’s because of my husband, I don’t even know how to say it. To write it, for writing it makes it real.

He is in the hospital. And that’s the good thing, that he’s in the hospital.

The planets aligned just right so that when his heart gave out, it did right in front of the paramedics.

He’d gone on a bike ride. No big deal, just for one hour this time, not the normal three or four. Just to the park ten minutes away, not the 50-mile ride he always does.

The kids were coming over for an early dinner, by a fluke all three of them. Our youngest, on a whim, came down from NYC for the weekend.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

He didn’t come back for seven days. Seven days where he rode the waves of full life support.

It’s been nine days since he went for that last bike ride and the journey to recovery has barely begun. The journey that we all embarked on when I answered the phone without thinking. Normally, I won’t answer unless I know who’s calling, but this time something made me pick up, even though I was in the midst of cooking and cleaning.

The journey that continued down that long, cold, endless ER corridor, my eyes drilling holes into the floor in front of me as I followed the tech who escorted me, afraid that if I looked up I would suddenly be confronted with a team in crisis moving in that synchronous, familiar ballet of saving a life.

This time with my own husband at the center of it. Lying there, helpless, colorless, and I feared, lifeless.

Hours and agonizing hours later, they came to me. They’d been successful in stabilizing him, enough to be moved to an ICU bed, enough to say he was still alive.

And he remains there, slowly, slowly moving along the slippery bonds that bind us to this precious earth.

Last summer at his beloved Redondo Beach, California, where he grew up surfing the waves.