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Angel Sightings and Invisible Gorillas

Angel Sightings and Invisible Gorillas

I met a man who saw an angel.  I’ve never seen an angel.  But then I didn’t see the gorilla either.

“My name is Dean,” I said.  He took my hand, a strong grip and didn’t let go.  “And you are…?”  The Family Promise coordinator had given me a name, but I didn’t remember it exactly, and it turned out to be incorrect anyway.

He was dark-skinned (a product of Portuguese and African-American roots I would later find out) and wore a fedora with the narrow brim, like Frank Sinatra back in the day.  He had thick-rimmed black glasses and looked like he was strong, over six feet tall with broad shoulders, a strength that may have faded with late middle age.  His grip still proved that he was no one to trifle with.  His left eye bored into me, his right eye wandered.

“You could call me that,” he said.  “My mama christened me Najee Abraham, so you could call me Najee or Abraham or…”

“What do you prefer?” I asked.  I wanted to know what to call him; we were both planning on spending the night on the same church floor, him because it was the best choice for his wife and eight grandchildren, me because I was trying to be a nice guy.  They could stay at the church if they had an overnight chaperone.

“You can call me either one, or you could call me captain, because I was a captain in the New York City Police Department, or you could call me pastor, because that’s mostly what I do now, or you could call me Marine, because I used to be one of those, or sniper for the same reason.”

I think when a man is newly homeless, humbled by his current circumstance, he likes to introduce the successes of his history early in the conversation. He still gripped my hand and held my gaze.

“I’m not calling you sniper,” I said.

He released my hand.  “Not sniper,” he said and laughed, now my friend.

Najee (we settled on that) and I sat down to dinner, and he told me more of his story, his music career, where to find his recordings on YouTube, his poetry, where to find the book that was still in print, and how he and his grandchildren had become homeless.

The two daughters of his second wife had six children between them, but they also shared addictions and the consequent inability to adequately care for children.  Five years ago Najee and his wife stepped in, vowing that their grandchildren would stay together as a family and not be sent to foster homes.  About a year later, they adopted another infant grandson.

Then, in 2015, Najee suffered a series of injuries and illnesses which included a severe injury to the bones, muscles and tendons of his right arm, diagnosis and proper treatment unfortunately delayed, and a ruptured appendix, diagnosis and appropriate treatment also delayed, with consequent widespread infection (septicemia) and respiratory failure requiring two months of ICU care during which period he was mostly unconscious on a respirator.  He was home for less than two weeks when he had a relapse and another several weeks in the hospital.  He said that though the treatment was hard, the hospital was so compassionate, always making him feel like he was a precious person deserving the best of care.

When patients are that sick, their care that intense, the experience for both providers and patients tends to become necessarily mechanistic and dehumanizing.  I asked which hospital, and he told me Grady Memorial in Atlanta, a place famous for its trauma center, care for the poor, and residency training programs, but not for its compassion.  I was surprised and I told him so.

“He was a nurse,” Najee said, “His name was Bob.  Every day he would come into my room and hold my hand and tell me it was going to be okay.  He had the most amazing smile, and I believed him.  Then one day, he didn’t come.  I asked the other nurses where Bob was.  They said they didn’t know any Bob.  I said, ‘I’m pretty sure he’s the head nurse.’  They shook their heads and said their head nurse was a woman named Helen.  I didn’t know what to think.  Next day Bob was back, same amazing smile.  I said, ‘Where you been?’  He said, ‘What? I don’t get a day off now and then?’  It took me a while to realize he was an angel.”

The day before I met Najee I had been reading Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos.  Jordan reminded me of the research done in perception psychology that had produced what is now a fairly widely seen short film of two teams of three passing a basketball back and forth.  One team is dressed in dark clothes and the other in light.  The audience, in my case a room of about two hundred physicians taking the mandatory course in risk management and error prevention, is asked to count the number of times the basketball is passed.  We’re a high performance group, we paid attention, we counted well.  Most of us got the answer right.  Fifteen passes per team for total of thirty.  Only one doctor at my table of nine thought that there had been someone else in the film, but couldn’t describe him.  Since he was only a podiatrist, we ignored him.

Then the leader asked how many saw the gorilla.  No one raised their hand.  He replayed the film.  A six-foot tall man in a gorilla suit came onto the screen within the first minute, stood in the middle of the basketball players, scratched himself and beat his chest.  It wasn’t subtle.  But no one saw him.  We saw only what we expected to see.  We took this as a cautionary note about broadening what we expect to see in the office, the hospital, and in surgery.

Peterson took the implications further.  He broadened that experiment to include others that demonstrate we register in our consciousness only about ten percent of what is presented to our visual fields.  We see only those things we are searching for, only the things we believe are there.  Only when a new visual cue interrupts our search do we notice (the gorilla never stepped in front of the basketball players).  We ignore all else.

I’m pretty sure that had I visited Najee in the hospital ICU, I would have checked his pulse and blood pressure and oxygenation levels and maybe some reflexes, and, like his doctors and nurses, I would have seen no angels.  I would have been counting basketball passes again, oblivious to the miracles happening around me.

Najee is not the first person I have heard describe an angel sighting.  Those who have shared their experiences with me have usually had some things in common with Najee: they are going through a time of great stress and fear, they are helpless to change their circumstances by their own efforts, and the angel always gives them the same message.  Don’t be afraid.  I have good news.  Be at peace.

Shortly after Najee returned home after his long illnesses, a daughter showed up at the house with a new grandson, now fourteen months old.  But something was wrong.  He couldn’t walk, he looked thin, ribs showed beneath his skin and his belly stuck out.  Then his mother, without announcement, went to the bus stop and left him with Najee and his wife.

But now Najee couldn’t work.  They took in the little boy, and he thrived with food and love.  He shared dinner with us that night in the church, too, remarkably bright and well-behaved for a three-year-old.  His big brothers and sisters take care of him and each other. They are gentle with each other, respectful to their grandparents, and polite to strangers.

A few months ago they moved to Jacksonville with the promise of help from friends or family, but the help fell through.  They lived, all ten, in a van, washing at public parks and buildings, driving to eight different school drop-off and pick-up points each day, sleeping elbow-to-elbow in the van each night.  Then they took their last cash reserves and rented a room for eight nights.

But Najee was not afraid.  He expected good news.  He was at peace.

On the seventh day they got a call from an angel, this one working for Family Promise of Jacksonville, and they started living in churches.  As of yesterday, they have found affordable housing.

I don’t know if I’ll see any angels this side of heaven, but I’m going to keep my eyes open and believe they are there when we need them.  In the meantime, I want to look for opportunities to be an angel.  I know just what to say: Don’t be afraid.  I have good news.  Be at peace.

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Happy New Year!

If you have been a regular reader of the articles on this website, you know that out spiritual journey has been along the Christian path.  Many of you share our faith.  Many others are still searching or are just plain curious.

If you are searching or curious, I would highly recommend the Alpha course.  It is a several week course that explores the basic tenets of Christianity in a form that is very user-friendly to those who come from outside the church, either from other faiths or from no faith at all.  Each session is two hours in length: 30-35 minutes of a free and shared meal, 20-30 minute video, and 45-60 minutes of discussion in a group of no more than 12 people who are also searching, plus one leader to keep things on time and on tract.

If you want more information about the course, go to alpha.org, and maybe sample a video.

If you live in the Jacksonville area, an Alpha class is beginning at CrossRoad UMC on January 8th at 6PM.  Register at:  http://www.crcumc.org/alpha/.  Or contact me or Sandy Dukelow at sandyd@crcumc.org.

Hope to see you there!

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Ghost of Christmas Past

Introduction

The story “Ghost of Christmas Past” has its origins in the first neurosurgery patient I saw as a medical student over forty years ago.  She was a twenty-two-year-old woman with a malignant brain tumor that had left her paralyzed and aphasic.  Her prognosis was terrible.

But the more terrible thing was that she had recently married and, after her diagnosis, her husband had left her to die alone.

Nothing in my experience, culture or religion prepared me to understand how he could leave.  I imagined his life and wondered how he could ever absolve himself from having left his lover during her last hours.

 

Reading time: about 9 minutes:

Ghost of Christmas Past

The Sunday after Thanksgiving I find out that Wilson, dressed in a Santa suit, turns out in fact, to be possessed by Maggie, God rest her soul, who died shortly after we married forty years ago.

I am the only one alive today who remembers Maggie.  I met her when she was an eighteen-year-old runaway from some small Minnesota town–New Ulm, maybe, while I was a lonely junior at the university living in a room above a restaurant.  We drank cheap wine, smoked bad weed, and made love on a mattress lying on the floor, Bob Dylan rasping off vinyl records, candles burning.  And incense, always a stick of incense burning in our room, filling not only the air but our clothes and our bodies with its scent.

Free love, though, was not free of guilt.  Not to her, a preacher’s kid.  We decided to marry.  For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health till death do us part, we promised at our courthouse wedding.  Her headaches started the next day.

I thought her symptoms meant she still felt guilty about deserting her family and her faith.  She made a mistake about me; she wanted to go home.  But she had made wedding vows.  Not that she said anything.  I just assumed; psych majors think that way.

Then she woke up goofy on our one-month anniversary.  Mumbling, clutching her head, falling, peeing herself.  I took her to the ER.  Psych ward is what I expected.  Brain surgery is what she got.

Maggie wasn’t dead the last time I saw her.  Not exactly.  She was in one of those semi-private rooms, the bed next to the window that looked over the chaos in the courtyard that faced the ER.  Sirens and curses drifted up all night long, before air conditioning and central heat sealed all the windows.  An old woman snored and smelled like feces in the first bed.  Maggie’s head, wrapped in a white turban, flopped awkwardly to the side, and drool leaked from the corner of her mouth.

The doctors said they thought she’d get better for a while.  Maybe.  Then the tumor would come back and she would die.

I stayed all night in her room, crowding into her bed, holding her, believing then that love could conquer all, even brain tumors, praying to a god I barely knew.  In the morning she moaned and drooled, and I learned that love might conquer some stuff.  But not brain tumors.

I climbed out of her bed and sat next to her, feeling cold and rumpled, my mouth dry and eyes red, thinking about maybe writing a letter to her father, telling him his daughter had a different last name now, the one that would be on her tombstone soon.  Then the sadness overwhelmed me, and I knew I could not write the letter, could not see her like this every day, or even five more minutes.

I could only walk away.  I went to our apartment, took the checkbook and one suitcase, and one hour later boarded a Greyhound to Florida.

How she got into Wilson sixty years later, God knows.

This year, Monday before Thanksgiving, my boss, Donahue, says to me, “Go ahead, Harry, leave me without my right hand.  Desert me now that I’m old.”

“You’re old?” I say.  “I’m five years older.  Quit with me.  You deserve the rest.”

“Rest?  Who needs rest?  I’ll be dead soon enough.”

“All the more reason.  You want to die behind that desk?”  This is pure rhetoric on my part.  He does want to die behind the desk with his people thinking he’s suffering.

“One thing I ask,” Donahue says,  “A favor for all the years we been together.”

“Sure.  Whatever,” I say, because thirty years working together makes me feel like I owe him something.  Or maybe he owes me.  I don’t know anymore.

“Stay through the holidays.  Six more weeks.  New Year’s Day, you’re a free man with my blessing.”  He pulled a big cigar from his humidor.  He’s not allowed to smoke them since the last couple of stents.  “And a big bonus check.”

“In retail, that six weeks is like working the whole year.”

“I don’t want you to be alone,” he says.

The old curmudgeon is worried about me, my first Christmas without Carol, the only wife he knows about.  “I’ll be okay.  Maybe I’ll go to New York.”  Carol’s son lives in New York with his wife and three-year-old son.

“New York’s no place to be for the holidays.”  He fingers the cigar like it’s a flute.  “Believe me, I know.”

The concern is touching.  I shrug.  But the truth is I am looking forward to the solitude.  Thirty years I’ve been merry at Christmas, and the only father to Carol’s son.  But for the past two years, congestive heart failure confined her to a chair, oxygen from green tanks keeping her alive, the tedium broken only by panicked trips to the hospital until no more tinkering helped, and she died.  At the end, she had the strength only for her last gasps, none for her voice.  No, this year solitude would be better.  Besides, I was weary to the bone.

“I need just one thing to survive another season of competition from Dillard’s and Nordstrom’s.”  He scowls and chomps the cold cigar.  “And Amazon.”  His local department storeisan anachronism in all but Donahue’s mind.  He is only trying to keep the store alive as long as he lives.

“I need someone to ride herd on Wilson,” he continues.

“The Santa?” I say.  Wilson was already an old man when I started thirty years ago.  He looked the part, talked the part, walked the part.  Kids loved him.  And now the kids, even the grandkids of the kids that loved him, came to see him.  He was our holiday season ace-in-the-hole.  Nordstrom’s couldn’t buy someone like that.  “Ride herd?”

“Yes.  He’s been sick.  Get him from wherever he lives and take him to and from the store looking like Santa every day from Black Friday to Christmas Eve.”

“What about…”

“All your other work goes to Banks.  He’ll be CEO next year.  He might as well get started now.”

“You want me to be Wilson’s granny-nanny?  That’s all?”

“Should be easy and somebody’s got to do it.  Or we have to find a new Santa.”  He puts the unlit cigar in his mouth and sucks longingly.  “And I don’t want to.  He’s worth $200,000 in sales.  A new guy…who knows?”

He gave me what I asked for: no stress.  Yet I feel devalued.  Executive VP to Santa’s transporter in five easy minutes.  Give me a red nose and call me Rudolf.  Wait till I tell Carol.

Then it hits me like a gut punch.  She’s dead, and I forgot.  It must show in my face because Donahue pulls the cigar down and looks at me.  “You okay?”

Breathe.  Easiest thing in the world to do.  Just breathe, one breath after another after another after another.

“I’m fine,” I say without thinking anymore.  “Sounds great.  I love Wilson.  Where do I find him?”  I do love Wilson.  He brings more than a sales bump.  Kids and their parents go away like they’ve received a special gift, somehow happier.

Turns out Wilson is living in a nursing home, but they don’t call it that anymore.  Sunnyvale Assisted Living they call it, but since nobody leaves except to the funeral home, it seems more like assisted dying to me.

“How ya doin’, Wilson?” I say when I visit the day before Thanksgiving.  “It’s me, Harry, from Donahue’s.”

The beard is good length and the color good, but he looks about a month overdue for a shampoo.  He’s sitting in one of those chairs upholstered with the plasticized fabric, the coagulated remnants of a breakfast in front of him.

His eyes brighten for a moment.  “Harry!” he says, and searches my face.  He lapses into disappointment as recognition escapes him.

I begin to think Donahue might have to make a new holiday sales strategy, one not involving an old, demented man whose beard is speckled with bits of toast and egg, but I give it a shot.

“It’s almost Christmas, Wilson.  Time to be Santa!”  My best effort at cheer.

His eyes brighten again, this time staying lit.  He straightens in his chair.  “I am Santa,” he says proudly.  “The Southern Santa.  Ho-ho-ho, y’all.”  He looks at his dingy cotton clothes and frowns.

“Of course you are,” I say and pull off the dry-cleaner bag to reveal the suit.

He rubs his beard and smiles.  “Merry Christmas!  Them little fellas be goin’ to need me.”

I smile and believe this might work.  I leave the suit and arrange for the necessary groomers to have him ready for prime time in forty-eight hours.

Black Friday is good.  Kids sit on his lap, he listens with rapt attention.  Moms hug him and ask if he remembers them.  “Of course,” he says.  “Santa never forgets.”

Saturday is just as good.  I pick him up at nine AM dressed and sparkling (holiday gratuities to the Sunnyvale staff does wonders).  I stand guard through the day, watching for him to wander, and sniffing for evidence of unwelcome bodily functions.  But no; he is perfectly behaved.

Then, on Sunday morning Wilson gets into the limo and says, “You should have gone to church.”  But it’s not like Wilson’s voice.  The tone is wrong; the accent is wrong.

“What?” I say.

“Ya, you betchya, you heard me okay.”

“You’re speaking like a Minnesotan,” I say, now eying him carefully.  He’s got my full attention and he looks like himself, except his sparkling eyes.  I smell incense.

“Sure then, what else would I be speaking?”  This is Maggie’ voice.  These are Maggie’s eyes.

“But you’re dead.”  I say this now not to Wilson, but to Maggie.

“Oofda!  Like I didn’t know.”

Wilson smiles.  Or perhaps Maggie; I don’t know.  Wilson in his Santa suit sits beside me, but Maggie’s eyes hold me.

“I missed you,” I say.

She shakes Wilson’s head.  “You left me.”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t miss you,” I say as the limo arrives at the store.

“Ya, sure then.  Me and Wilson’s gotta go now.”

I follow, standing guard again, searching for Maggie in the ho-ho-ho’s, but finding only Santa.  I am delusional.  Not dealing with the stress.  I start to call my doctor.  I should take some Prozac or Xanax or something.  But I don’t make the call.

I decide, if this is delusion, I still want it.  I hadn’t lied. I missed her every day. If this is real, I want my second chance.

Wilson’s shift ends at eight PM, and I have all day to think about her.  Not that I haven’t thought about her every day for the past forty years, waking every morning with the knowledge of a personal character failure so great that my first decision each day was limited to earning back my own self-respect or suicide.  Going to bed each night remembering her when I still believed there would always be enough time.  A whiff of incense could stop me in my tracks.

Now I have a glimmer of hope.  Because who could forgive me?  God?  What’s it to Him?  My sin is against Maggie, and she’s gone.  Or maybe now she’s back?  Or, more likely, I am finally insane in a way I can no longer hide.

I meet Wilson at the store and I escort him to the limo.  He grins and waves to the children.  Ho, ho, ho, he says, but I wait for her eyes.

“So whatchya got to say for yourself?” she asks, once we are inside the dim and quiet interior of the car.  Again I hear Maggie’s voice through Wilson’s body.

“Sorry.”  I say what I’ve been waiting all day–all my life, really–to say, tossed out as a breadcrumb-sized word, something easily lost.

“Ya?” she says.

Not forgiveness really, but an opening.  I tell her I was already alone before I left.  Her mind was gone, her body already wasting.  How I saw nothing but grief.  How I couldn’t call her family, wouldn’t call mine.

“I heard you leave.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.  Two breadcrumbs.

“You kept me warm until morning.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I thought you didn’t know,” I say.  An explanation, maybe an excuse.

“It was so cold,” she says, “after you left.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.  The third crumb.

She says nothing more for the rest of the ride.  When we reach Sunnyvale, he is Wilson again, arriving at the door, waving, and shouting, Ho, ho, ho, ya’all to the staff and residents when I escort him into the lobby.

Hansel dropped breadcrumbs so that he and Gretel could find their way home.  But it didn’t work; birds ate them, and they remained lost.  I spend the night as I have spent many nights, dreaming about Maggie and wishing for forgiveness.  Only this night she seems so close, and forgiveness still so far away.

Morning comes with my familiar self-loathing, and again I fight despair.  But today, I tell myself, I can seek forgiveness.

Wilson is Wilson when I meet him at the Sunnyvale lobby, and I am disappointed.  But Maggie re-animates him as we enter the limo.

“So, how’d ya get to Florida?” she says.

I tell her about the one suitcase and the long bus trip, about finding a job, summers so hot you could burn the skin off your feet walking barefoot at the beach during the middle of the day.  About a thousand meals eaten alone, and waking each morning to fight guilt and sorrow.  Then, before I am finished, we are at Donahue’s, Wilson gets out, and I am alone for the day. I pray that if I am delusional, I will have the same delusion at the end of the day.

Delusion or not, when Wilson enters the limo, Maggie re-appears.  We talk, or mostly I talk.  We talk about me mostly, because it’s hard for her to explain about being dead.  Sometimes she asks a question, but mostly I ramble on about meeting Carol, a divorced woman with a four-year-old son, and how we rescued each other.  And how that rescue, if not love exactly, was enough glue to keep us together and enough comfort to keep us alive.

The ride seems short, and this Maggie-possessed Wilson leaves me wanting more.  I look forward to the next morning.  Maybe she will be there again.

And she is.  Every morning, every evening.  This is nice, having her to talk to, she who was my first love, when all dreams were possible, before the sadness, before the constraints of a mortgage and a three-piece suit.  Before Carol died.  Before I was demoted to the role of a reindeer.

On December 23rd, Maggie/Wilson gets out at Sunnyvale.  I want to follow, but Maggie stops me.  “Wilson’s tired,” she says.

I’m listening to the voice of a young woman and not seeing the body of the old man anymore.  She’s right, now that I look.  He’s ashen, breathing heavily with little beads of sweat on his forehead in spite of the chill.

“I’ll call somebody,” I say.

Wilson shakes his head, and she says, “No.  We’ll see you in the morning.”

In the morning, Christmas Eve, Wilson is better.  He walks from the front door of Sunnyvale to the limo swinging his gold-tipped cane and whistling Jingle Bells.  He looks ready for another day of kids climbing into his lap, but I worry that time is running out.

“So, are you sucking the life out of Wilson?” I say to Maggie when I see her eyes.  “Because he’s not looking so good since you showed up.”

I say this because I am afraid.  I know this is the last day of the limousine rides, but I hope that Maggie will not disappear.  If Wilson dies, I fear she will be dead again, too.  I am in love with a delusion, and although the delusion may not be real, the fear is.

But the question makes her mad.  “You know nothing,” she says.

“Why now?  Why Wilson?” I ask her.

“It is hard to explain,” she says, “Wilson is standing on the threshold of a door, and I am his guide.”

“You came for Wilson?” I say, disappointed.

“Yes.  When good men stand at a threshold, loving beings stand by them.  Sometimes they need an angel,” she says.  “But you, too, want something.”

I, too, am standing at a door, one closing quickly.  “Forgiveness,” I say.

But she doesn’t answer.  Not right away.  Wilson whistles Good King Wenceslas.  Then, just as we pull up to the curb at Donahue’s, she turns to me and says, “You stayed with Carol.”

This is true.  Even at the end, when Carol knew she wouldn’t make it and she asked me to leave, I couldn’t.  I want to ask Maggie if this is an accusation or a recognition of atonement, but the limo stops and the door pops open. They get out and go into the store, leaving me fraught with questions.  All day I practice explanations; there is only one limo ride left.

When Wilson comes out of Donahue’s that evening, he leans heavily on the cane that he had swung so freely in the morning.  His eyes are down, and he shuffles.  His ho-ho-ho’s were limited a single needed response to an excited child.  As soon as I see him I call Sunnyvale to request a wheelchair meet us at the curb.  But once he settles into the limo, he straightens and brightens.  Maggie returns.

She doesn’t wait for my question.  “Sure,” she says, “you’re forgiven.”

I want to cry with relief, but I have another urgent question.  “When Wilson dies, will you be gone?”

“Yes.”

“Can you take me with you?”

She thinks about this for awhile, like maybe she is trying to figure out how to tell a child something that only an adult can understand.  Finally she says, “It’s not your time.”

I shake my head.  Tears are close to falling.

“Wilson gives gifts to children and hope to grown men.  He has been needed here.  You are still needed.”

The limo pulls up to the curb at Sunnyvale, and a nurse greets us with a wheelchair.  Wilson needs help just to get out of the limo.  He flops into the wheelchair and I push him to his room.  The nurse walks beside us.  He wheezes as we go down the hall.  Maggie is gone, but I don’t want to say good-bye.

“He can rest now,” I tell the nurse.  “We won’t need him again until next year.”

The nurse gets Wilson out of his Santa suit and into red flannel pajamas.  “We all think it’s really nice what you’ve done for Mr. Wilson,” she says.  She tucks him into bed.  “But I don’t think next year…”

I follow her out of the room.  “He’s just tired, right?”

“You don’t know?”

“What?”

“Mr. Wilson has lung cancer.  He’s dying.  We didn’t expect him to last much past Thanksgiving.  But when you came along with the Santa Claus gig, he got a new life somehow.”  She shakes her head.  “But he won’t last long now.”

I look back into the room.  Wilson’s mouth is open and his eyes are closed.  His cheeks have given in to gravity.  “Maggie,” I say.

“My name is Cathy,” the nurse says.

“Of course,” I say.  Maggie’s gone, and Wilson doesn’t need me anymore.  I should go find my own Christmas somewhere.  But I feel so weary.

“I think I’ll stay for a while,” I tell Cathy.

I sit by the bed and take Wilson’s hand.  It feels like ice.  His fingers close weakly around mine.  “You can’t die twice,” I say.

“What do you know?” he says, but it’s Maggie.

“Nothing,” I say.  “But what do I do now?”

“You will give gifts to small children and hope to grown men,” she says, “and women.”

Later, maybe around midnight, church bells sound in the distance, followed by the faint strains of Silent Night.  He breathes in irregular gasps.  I roll him onto his side, hoping to ease his suffering.

I slip off my shoes and remove my coat, then climb into the bed and lay against his back, sharing his pillow, spooning my body around his, encasing his chest in my arms.  His heart beats weakly under my hand, and he is cold, cold like Maggie in that hospital room long ago.  I pull my coat over both of us.  I worry that Nurse Cathy will come back, and I will have no explanation.  Perhaps she will call the police.

Wilson’s heart stops.

Maggie says, “We are going now.”

“I miss you.”

“Take the Santa suit as a remembrance,” she says.

I get up then, put on my shoes and coat.  I close Wilson’s eyes and cover him with the sheet.  Then I take the Santa suit, and hold it to my face.  It smells like incense.

I decide that it is not too late to go to New York.  My grandson needs a gift.  Or I need to give him one; I don’t know anymore.  And my stepson has lost his mother; he needs someone to tell him about forgiveness and hope.

 

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Miracles Deferred

Snow quiets a city like New Haven, especially at night.  Traffic slows, tire sounds and footsteps muffle.  Even the sirens seem softer.  Silent night, I thought.

It had already been a long day when I lay down in the call-room and closed my eyes, grateful for the quiet.  The time was just after midnight and it looked like I could get in six hours of sleep before the alarm and the chaos started again.

I heard a pop.  My eyes opened, and I thought gunshot.  The noise had come from somewhere out in those downtown streets where all the other sounds had been muffled.  I re-calculated my expected rest time to how long it would take for police to clear the scene, the ambulance to arrive, and the victim be transported to the ER.  Forty-five minutes maybe.

Then I closed my eyes again and tried to convince myself it was nothing.  A car could have backfired, I told myself, but I knew it wasn’t true.  I had heard handguns and I had heard cars.  This was a gunshot.

Then I reassured myself it was someone else’s problem.  I had heard only one shot, and whoever they were 1) could have missed, or 2) could have hit something other than the head or spine.

I dozed off.

Forty-five minutes later the phone rang.  The intern in the ER had a young man with a gunshot wound to his shoulder who wasn’t moving his legs.  X-rays were still pending, but maybe I could come and take a look?

By the time I arrived the x-rays had been done.  The bullet had entered the shoulder but skimmed along the top of the scapula and lodged in the middle of the thoracic spinal canal, a place normally reserved for the spinal cord.

I talked to the victim.  Apparently the issue had been a card game; he still swore he hadn’t been cheating.  His spinal cord injury was complete: no sign of any function in either lower extremity–no movement, no sensation, no reflexes.

I called our director for spinal cord injury, and he agreed with me that the prognosis for recovery was nil, but scheduled the patient for emergency surgery to remove the bullet and seal the wound to prevent infection.  I assisted in the surgery.  We opened the spinal canal and retrieved the bullet.  The cord was completely destroyed.  I remember the clank as the bullet dropped into the metal basin.

I didn’t see the patient again for five years, and would never have seem him again except for a quirk in the department schedule.  I had finished my residency, but was still on the payroll for another month.  The department chairman figured I could do some work in our research lab and specifically get some of the difficult data into our database for long-term outcomes of spinal cord injury.

The secretary gave me a file for a patient in Bridgeport, a bad neighborhood in a bad city.  The patient hadn’t been seen by our department since discharge to rehab five years before.  Although nobody thought his outcome would be anything except complete paralysis, an exam had to be done for the data to be entered.  I headed to Bridgeport.

The man who answered the door was the same man who hadn’t cheated at cards.  It had been five years, but it was clearly the same guy.  I remembered him specifically not only because I had reviewed the record but because I remembered hearing the gunshot that had paralyzed him.

The surprise was that he wasn’t in a wheelchair.  Yes, he had a wheelchair in the back corner of the living room and used it when he went out, but he got around the house on his own two legs using a cane or balancing himself on the furniture.  Though his gait was nowhere near normal, he walked sufficiently for self-care at home.

What I witnessed was a bonafide medical miracle.  Gunshot wounds to the thoracic spinal cord always, always, always result in complete paralysis.  Victims never walk.

But since that exam in Bridgeport, I never say always and I never say never.  I was humbled into allowing room for hope in every hopeless case.

I would like to claim that this miracle occurred because of radically new medical or surgical care, and I know he received good care–but only the same care that everyone else who never did walk received.  I would like to claim he was healed by the intervention of prayer and faith, but the card-player never mentioned it, and back then it never crossed my mind to ask.  So I have no explanation, or even a testimony, but that’s what miracles are always: unexpected hope without explanation.

But without hearing the gunshot on a quiet winter night five years before, I wouldn’t have remembered the circumstances and understood that what I saw later was a miracle.  I would have just filled out a form for the research project and been oblivious.

So here’s the curious thing about some miracles: you might not know you are witnessing the beginning of a miracle.  You might not get to see the end of the story.  Or, conversely, you might be witnessing a miracle, but because you don’t know the backstory, you don’t know it’s a miracle.

Sometimes God gives us signs, though.  To me he gave the sound of a gunshot on a silent night.  To shepherds outside of Bethlehem, He sent an angel.  To men who searched for the truth, he gave a star.  He sends us signs to remember so that when we are privileged to witness another sign five years later, or thirty years later, we will know it for the miracle it is.

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Halo

Elisa thought she heard a bell, which was odd because her apartment didn’t have a doorbell.  If anyone ever came to her door they would have to knock.  Not that anyone ever came, except once, the UPS driver, only he had the wrong address.  And now it was five o’clock on Christmas Eve–a little late for delivery of anything.

She decided to get up and look.  After all, she was doing nothing except thinking about the eleven-to-seven shift at the hotel downtown.

She was just a security guard now.  But in a year or two, when she was twenty-one and finished a couple of years of college and got into the police academy, then she’d be a real cop.  Until then she still got to wear the cool security guard uniform.

Except, she needed a hat.  The job didn’t require it, because some assignments were always indoors and most of the guys and all of the women thought it stupid to wear hats indoors.  But her current assignment included patrolling outside and in the parking ramp.  Although it might be stupid to wear a hat indoors, it was definitely stupid to be without one out-of-doors in Minneapolis in December.

She knew what she wanted.  One of those round hats with the short brim in front like real cops wore.  Or like bus drivers used to wear, at least in the picture books Mom read to her when she was little.

Mom.  What would she think about a Minnesota winter?  She never left Florida after October or before May, and then only as far north as the Carolinas.  She wasn’t happy about Elisa leaving for Minnesota.  Especially not to follow that boy to welding school here.  Well, Mom was right about the future welder turning out to be nothing but a present day bum.  But Mom seemed less concerned about keeping Elisa warm than about keeping her close and controlled.

Her mother’s complaints echoed in her head.  Why couldn’t you be a teacher or a nurse.  Why couldn’t you settle down close to home, marry a nice boy, have babies.  Well, you could if you just spend a some time on yourself.  A little make-up wouldn’t kill you.

Elisa sighed.  She would rather face a Minnesota winter and a minimum wage job than go back to Florida and hear I told you so for the rest of her life.

She looked through the peephole at an empty hallway then opened the door.  A small, cardboard box lay on the mat, a smudge of melting snow on top.

She listened and it didn’t tick.  She shook it and it didn’t rattle.  Only a muffled thump, thump.  She slit open the seal with her pocket knife–a good cop always has a good knife–and opened it.

A hat.  A perfect hat.  Round, and blue like her uniform with a small, black brim in front, and lined for winter.  Even fold-down ear flaps. And it even had a thin, gold band all around the edge of the base.  Real metal, maybe brass.  Maybe even gold!  Elisa chose to believe it was at least gold-plated.

She tried it on.  Hats were hard to fit over her explosive blonde curls.  Can’t do a thing with it, her mother used to say.  Looks like a Norwegian afro.

Thanks, Mom.

But this one fit perfectly.  She admired herself in the mirror.  Of course, she looked goofy wearing the hat with her bathrobe, but still.  The hat was great.

She searched the package for a card or return address.  No card, no clue in the fine print on the label.  Maybe Mom.  Maybe she meant it as a message of forgiveness for moving, and affirmation for her ambitions, even if Mom wanted her to be something else.  Maybe it was all about love.

Snow fell heavily in the darkness as she left the apartment, her new hat snugged over her curls, coat buttoned to her chin.  She boarded the one lone bus that swayed and swerved through the nearly deserted downtown streets.

She trudged the last two blocks through knee-high fluff.  The snow continued to fall heavily, and the snowplows wouldn’t be able to clear the roads until morning.  The bus she left would be the last one of the night.  As she passed the fire station, four firemen shoveled the broad driveway, working as a unit and clearing the snow as it fell, looking like a team of horses in need of a sleigh to complete a Christmas card scene.  The parking lot for the Lutheran church next door wasn’t so lucky.  A plow had come earlier, but the snow looked to be a good six inches deep with lots more falling by the minute.

Entering the hotel, she was surprised to find it filled with plump, white-bearded old men.  The harried desk clerk filled her in.  Santa Claus convention.  All the Santas in the state were done with their seasonal duties and planned a three-day party to celebrate, compare costumes and tips, and get ready for next year.

“Filled every room,” he said.  “Had to turn away some poor, dumb guy from West Virginia and his wife.”

Elisa couldn’t imagine looking for a hotel in this storm.  She’d never even driven on snow.  “They’ll be okay?”

The clerk shrugged.  “I guess.  Anyway, we got enough trouble here already.”

“The Santas?”

“Well, that.  And electricity is out, phone lines are out, internet is out, and we’re running on emergency backup power.”

Elisa shivered.  She had never been in a blizzard before.  The celebrating Santas seemed incongruous to the weather.  Like a hurricane party, she thought.  Except cold.

She walked the hallways and checked the monitors in the security room.  The Santas played out around midnight, and the rooms became quiet.  The hallways and lobby were lit only by emergency lighting.  Silent night, she thought.  Except for the howling wind.

Carefully she removed the badge from her blue shirt taking care not to snag the pin and fray the cloth.  “Simpson’s Security” it read when you got up close.  But from three feet away, it looked like a badge a real cop could wear.  With equal caution she pinned it on her wool overcoat and went out into the storm.

She made a quick inspection of the alley and the street front.  Deserted.  She left the side exit of the hotel into the parking garage and started walking up the ramps.  Before the weather turned cold she rode her bike to work then used it to do the garage inspection; it took five minutes.  Now, walking the ramp, up and down, would take half-an-hour in the cold.

The garage was unheated, but sheltered from the wind, and with small enough openings between floors to let in only a little snow.  Driven by the cold she hurried up the ramp, puffing great clouds of vapor and stomping her boots.  By the time she reached the third level, she was out of breath and sweating.  She stopped and unbuttoned her coat.

That was when she heard the engine running somewhere above.  Certainly no one had come in recently; the car would have had to pass her.  And almost as certainly, no one was leaving.  Not on a night like this.

Still, that’s why she did patrols.  Sometimes, someone left their lights on.  Sometimes, they left the whole car on.

As she rounded the corner to the fifth level she was already thinking about re-buttoning her coat as her shirt front felt frozen to her skin.  Then she saw great clouds of exhaust fumes coming from an SUV.  Her gloved hands fumbled to retrieve her pen and writing pad.   All she needed to do was take down the license number and get the clerk to use his computer to find out which guest had left his car running.

West Virginia plate, she noted.  Had the clerk said something about someone from West Virginia?

The windows were fogged over.  Elisa walked to the driver-side door.  Maybe the same idiot who had left it running had left it unlocked, and she could shut it down, leave the keys at the desk, and save the guest a cold trip out to his car in the middle of the night.

She tried the door handle, but no luck.  But as she turned away, the door opened.  A guy in a wool shirt-jacket, way too thin for a Minnesota winter, poked his head out.  His hair was too long, and his beard untrimmed.  One leg came out of the car, his left hand on his knee, but he remained sitting, twisted, looking back at her.  She saw his eyes go straight to the badge then flip to the hat before looking down.

“The hotel clerk said we could park here,” he said.

“You’re the guy he sent away.”  She meant it to sound more like a question than an accusation.

“Yeah.” He kept looking down.  “But, see, I tried to drive away, and the car started skidding, and the wheels spinning, and I never drove in anything like this before.  So I turned her into the ramp.  Figured ain’t no one else gonna park here tonight.”  He looked up now, met her eyes for the first time, a little defiant, a little scared maybe.  “We ain’t doing nobody no harm.”

Then Elisa heard another voice coming from somewhere inside the car.  “Tell her, Joe.  She can help.”

Joe looked back over his shoulder into the car.  “She’s a cop, Marie.”

Elisa heard Marie again, this time more like a yelp, quickly choked into a groan.  Joe twisted back into the car.

“I’m not a cop,” Elisa said as the door thunked closed.  She stood a moment in the cold, pulling her coat across her chest, trying to decide what to do.  Joe didn’t want her help.  They weren’t hotel guests.  It wasn’t her responsibility.  She could just put it her report, and get back to someplace warm.

She turned and walked to the back of the car and wrote down the license number.  Exhaust still filled the vehicle lane.  She thought about carbon monoxide and the unexplained yelp, and couldn’t walk away.

She stomped up to the passenger-side door and yanked the handle.  This time it wasn’t locked.  The door jerked open and she saw Marie for the first time, a kid, maybe younger than Elisa herself, sweating, panting with her mouth open, her eyes fixed on something on the car roof, and holding both her hands over an enormous belly.

“Jesus,” Elisa said.

“My legs is all wet,” Marie said between gasps.  “Am I bleeding?”

Elisa looked across the car to Joe.

“We didn’t expect this,” he said.  “We thought we’d be okay til morning.”

Elisa’s reflex was to run.  Somebody qualified needed to be here.  A doctor, an EMT, even a cop.  She checked her cell phone to see if a signal had returned.  It had not.  She calculated the time it would take for her to run out of the ramp and down the street to the fire station.  In the snow.  A long time.

Marie took a breath and seemed to gain control.  She took one hand from her belly and grabbed hard for Elisa’s.  “Thank God you’re here,” she said, turning her head and locking eyes with her.

“Yeah,” Joe said.  “Thanks.  I didn’t mean nothing about you being a cop and all…”

“I’m not a cop,” she said, and they both looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language.  Then Marie was racked with another contraction, and they both looked scared.

Elisa fought panic.  Women had babies all the time.  Sometimes in cars.  Cabbies delivered them.  Cops delivered them.

“Don’t worry,” she said.  “Everything is going to be just fine.  Great, even.”

Joe said, “Just tell us what to do.”   Marie nodded.

“You’re going to have a baby,” Elisa said with more confidence than she felt.  “A healthy, strong baby.  Probably the best baby in the world.  But first, we’ll move to the back seat where you’ll have more room.”

She swung Marie’s legs out the door and made sure her feet were planted on the pavement.  Then she took her hands and put them around her own neck.  “We’re going to stand up here.  You get a good hold, and when I say three, you stand up.”

Marie got to her feet and made a slow waddle to the rear door.  Elisa eased her in and made her lie back.  To Elisa’s great relief, Marie’s jeans were soaked with water, not blood.  Elisa pulled them off.  “Take my coat,” she said.

Her shirt was little barrier to the cold, but she barely noticed as she positioned Marie with both knees up and spread.  Don’t panic, Elisa told herself.  Act like you’ve done this a million times.

Then the baby’s head showed.

“What do you want me to do?” Joe asked, as he twisted around from the driver’s seat.

Boil water.  Go for help.  Deliver the baby.  She wanted him to do everything and trusted him to do nothing.  “Give me your jacket.  Your baby’s going to need it.”

Joe turned around to kneel in the driver’s seat, stripping off his jacket, then holding Marie’s hand.

No rings, Elisa noticed.  Like it made a difference now.  Marie cried out and pulled her knees up.  Her dark hair stuck to the sweat that covered her forehead.  Elisa took the jacket in her right hand and waited.  Her back froze, even as her face and arms felt the interior warmth of the car.  “It’s going to be okay,” she said, almost believing it.

Marie cried out again, and the baby’s head seemed to spread her thighs.

“Next time push, Marie.  Don’t be afraid.  You’re going to be fine.”

The baby’s face appeared, covered with blood and slime.  Then a shoulder.  Then a naked, slippery body.  Elisa caught the child in Joe’s jacket.

“It’s a boy,” she said.  “A perfect, baby boy.”

Joe and Marie tried to hug across the barrier of the seat and settled for holding both hands.

“I need you to come and stand here, Joe,” Elisa said.

Joe tore himself away and came around the car.  Elisa handed him the baby, the umbilical cord still attached, afterbirth still in the womb.  She pulled out her pocket knife and cut  strips from the lining of her coat to tie the cord.  She cut the cord and handed the baby to his mother.

So blue, so small.  He cried and coughed.  He cried again, now red-faced and mad.  Elisa closed the door and shivered without her coat.

“Joe, get back in there.  You have to keep them warm.”

His mouth still hung partly open, still in the shock that comes from witnessing new life, but as her words registered a new look of determination came to his face.  He marched to the driver door like he was marching to war, his assignment and duty clear.

“I’m going for help,” she said.

“We got an old Hudson Bay blanket in the back.  One of those white ones with the stripes.”

She nodded, grateful.  She would have had to make the effort anyway, but now she might survive.  She headed down the ramp and into the storm toward the fire station on the next block wrapped in the white blanket, the stripes dragging through the snow, making her nearly invisible except for her hat.

The station stood in the shadow of an old Lutheran church, and inside the church dim lights still shone out of stained-glass windows.  Elisa heard singing, probably from Christmas Eve attendees who were trapped by the blizzard and making the best of it.

She ran across the shoveled driveway and pounded on the station door.  No answer.  She pounded again and stepped back.  Lights came from the second story windows where she assumed the firefighters lounged between calls.  She threw a snowball at the windows.  Thump.  She shivered with cold and frustration.  She threw another.  Harder.  And another.

A window opened.  “Hey, cut it out down there.  Whattya think you’re doing?”

Elisa shined her light at the fireman.  “A baby’s been born!” she shouted.  “A perfect baby.  And he’s laying in an SUV in a parking garage.  Come quick!”

The fireman blinked and shielded his eyes from her light.

“Come on!” she shouted, waving her arm.

He turned and said something to the room.  In a minute the doors opened and the rescue van pulled into the driveway.  An EMT opened the door and stood on the running board.  “Okay, lady, hop in and show us the way,” he said.  “And this better not be some kind of gag.”

She jumped in and shivered in her blanket.  “The next block.  The parking garage next to the hotel.  Level five.  Please hurry.”

The siren must have roused someone in the church because the front doors flew open and the sounds of Joy to the World filled the street.

The rescue truck had no problem with the deep snow, and in less than five minutes they had found the SUV.  Then, in what seemed the blink of an eye, Marie and Joe and their baby had disappeared, whisked away to some warm hospital, leaving Elisa standing in the garage alone holding a wet and stained coat with a torn lining.

“Where’ve you been?” the clerk said, as her boots dripped onto the faux-marble tiles and snow flakes turned to water on her eyebrows.  A layer of snow topped her new hat.  “I had to send a waiter to break up a fight on the seventh floor.”

“A fight?”

“Yeah.  A couple Santas got into it.”

“You need me to got up there?”

“Naw. The bartender brought each guy a pint of whiskey, but only if they locked themselves in their rooms.”

“See?” she said, with a wink and a shrug.  “You don’t need me.”

She kept walking, seeking the solitude and the warmth of the security room where she could watch the world on a dozen little flat screens.  She examined her coat and decided it would be wearable in the morning, the blood stains around the fringes not so noticeable on the dark fabric.

Now that she was alone, the events of the night became like a story that had happened to someone else.  It didn’t seem real.  She didn’t even know the last names of those people.  They certainly didn’t know hers.

An intense experience might not turn into a vivid memory unless she could talk it out.  But she didn’t have anybody to tell, not at three-o-clock Christmas morning.   She would have to wait.

Her replacement was delayed by the weather, or maybe that was just a convenient excuse to let him have Christmas morning at home.  He arrived at ten instead of seven.  Buses were still not running, so she walked home.  By noon she was at her apartment, curled under a quilt, sleeping, her hat resting on the coffee table.

She woke at four, not rested but unable to sleep any longer, to the last light of Christmas Day.  She toasted to the holiday with a glass of orange juice, and polished the gold band around her new cap.  Good old Mom.  She came through after all.  Elisa checked her phone.  Cell service was back.  She could call home.

“Merry Christmas, Mom.”

“Well I hope you learned your lesson now, little missy, and next time you’ll think twice about leaving your mother alone.”

Elisa took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  “Yeah, well.  Merry Christmas.  I wanted to thank you for the hat.  So sweet of you.”

“I didn’t send you nothin’.  Wanted you to know the consequence of deserting your family.  ‘Specially at Christmas.”

Elisa, disappointed that she was not forgiven, perhaps not loved, waited, hoping that given the opportunity that silence allows, her mother would confess to the affirming gift, or at least say something of comfort or reconciliation.

Silence.

Finally, Elisa said, “I helped a baby boy get birthed last night.”

“Don’t you be messin’ with me, girl.  You some kind a rent-a-cop at a motel or something.”

Elisa wondered if she could treasure a memory that she couldn’t share, if it was worth insisting on the truth when the truth would not be believed.  Maybe she could think of an alternative truth, one that could be believed, one that could be shared.

“Well, I got to play the part of an angel,” she told her mother.  “Got to wear a halo and everything.”

“That so, honey? Like in one of those Christmas pageants?  That’s nice.  Now, you get yourself home before next Christmas, girl, you hear?”

“Merry Christmas, Mom,” she said, pressed the End button, and still wondered who sent the hat.

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Ultimate Reality

I showed up at the Student Health ENT Clinic fresh from my second-year lectures about the anatomy and physiology of pain.  Since my undergraduate degree had been in psychology, I also felt that I had an edge in understanding the emotional component to pain.  Though pain was on my mind, the reason for my ENT visit was the aggravating but nearly painless problem of persistent otitis externa–swimmer’s ear.

Interns and residents, bright, knowledgeable young men and women lacking only experience, staffed the Student Health Service.  Being all of twenty-three myself, I was convinced experience was highly overrated, and happy to accept the free and convenient care.

“No problem,” the resident said.  “You just sit here and I’ll curette out that wax and debris.  You’ll feel better in no time.”

I relaxed.  He curetted.  And in ten seconds I experienced the most intense pain of my life.  I jerked away and stifled a scream.

The resident told me to stay still.  I relaxed.  Pain is a state of mind, I told myself.  Mind over matter.  I willed myself into an immobile zen-like state.

He curetted again.  I jerked away again.  We repeated the scenario multiple times.  In the end, I still had otitis externa, and now a whole new understanding of pain.  There is no mind-over-matter.  There is no zen-like state.  Pain is pain.

A few years later I took care of an old man with a compression fracture of his thoracic spine.  His fall had been minor, and osteoporosis had made him susceptible to such fractures.  The important thing, I kept telling him, was that his spinal cord was in no danger and these injures always healed with time and rest.  But it hurts bad, he told me.  So I gave him a generous prescription for narcotics before he went home from the hospital.

A few weeks later I saw him in the office.  “It hurts bad,” he said.  I asked if the pain medicine was working.

“Not taking it,” he said.  “It’s narcotics.  I don’t want to be no dope addict.”

I assured him that he would not get addicted using the medicine only while he was healing.

He looked doubtful.  “How long?” he asked.

“Six to twelve weeks,” I said.  “From the time of injury.  Another month or two.  No more.”

He gave me the same skeptical look, but this time shaded with something darker.  “I don’t know if I can take it,” he said.

“Take the pain medicines,” I told him.  “Rest.  Be patient.  You’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t worried.  In a few weeks he would be back to normal, which for him involved caring for his rural cabin where he spent his life hunting and fishing.  I had no reason to think this would not be his future.

A few weeks later, his wife called to tell me he was now in great distress.  She was afraid for him.  I got him on the phone.  “The pain’s so bad,” he said.  “I don’t think I can take it.”

I asked about the pain medicines.  He wasn’t taking them.  I reassured him and asked if he wanted to come back to the hospital.  He didn’t.  I got his wife back on the phone and told her to bring him in if it got too bad.  She told me that I didn’t know what he was like.

“He will be okay,” I told her.  “The pain is temporary.  He will heal.”

Two hours later Rescue called from the patient’s kitchen.  He had shot himself in the chest with a shotgun, aiming for the painful fracture site which was located immediately behind his heart and aorta.  He was dead within minutes.

He possibly would have been okay if he had taken his narcotics.  He possibly would have been okay if he had come back to the hospital.  He certainly would have been okay if he had been patient, if he would have–could have– given himself the time to heal.  If only he could have stepped outside of time and stepped back in a few weeks later.  But instead he was dead, a victim of the white-hot obliteration of rational thought and panic induced by uncontrolled pain.

Pain is the ultimate reality, psychiatrist Jordan Peterson stated.  None of our philosophies or religions or meditation strategies can completely take us out of our physical state in this time-space-matter continuum, and nothing drives that point home more poignantly than pain.

Often a patient with a concussion experiences something like stepping out of time for a day.  This concussion patient suffers an injury then a quick return to consciousness but with amnesia for the traumatic event and events several hours before.  He then loses the ability to retain any new information for the next twenty-four hours.  He repeatedly asks where he is, what happened to him, how long he’s been there.  After their questions are answered, almost immediately he will repeat the same questions.  It is as if time now stands still in his mind.  He remembers everything up to one moment, then nothing new.  Nearly always he will return to normal the next day.

The curious thing is that patients with this type of concussion rarely complain of pain, even if they have suffered a broken bone or worse during the traumatic event.  But the next day, when memory returns, pain returns.

Pain, therefore, seems to require us to be conscious of our place in time.

Which brings us to Jesus.

If God is God, and created the universe, one hundred billion galaxies with one hundred billion stars each, and God is all-knowing, and He exists in eternity, that is, not simply forever but outside the limits of time, then God knows of pain but does not experience it.  Yet, He made a decision to not let one species on one tiny planet circling one middling star in one middling galaxy, destroy itself, even if it cost Him some mystical transformation into flesh and time, and, yes, pain like that white-hot thought-obliterating, panic-inducing pain that would cause one to blow their heart away with a shotgun.

So this is the miracle of Christmas: the Creator of the Universe chose to experience pain like yours so that you could experience love like His, and someday you, too, can step into eternity, outside of time and outside of pain.  And into great joy.

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Broken

 

The patient had just murdered his wife.  A single shot from his handgun had sent her straight to the morgue.  Then, with a sudden loss of basic marksmanship, he failed to kill himself.  He placed the gun in his mouth, allowed an awkward angle, fired, and the bullet lodged in the right temporal lobe of his brain, narrowly missing the structures that would have led to his immediate death.

Frankly, I lacked enthusiasm for treating him.  He wanted to die.  He deserved to die.  I wanted him judged by the standard of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.  But the discipline of medicine allows no such judgements, and I found myself in the operating room removing the bullet, debriding damaged brain, and sealing the cranial cavity from potential contamination from the tract through the mouth and sinuses.  Miraculously, and somewhat to my disappointment, he survived.

And he survived well.  On day one, I changed his bandage.  On day three, he regained consciousness with no loss of vision or paralysis.  On day five, I removed his stitches.  He suffered no complications despite the high risk of infection.  Physical therapy supervised his return to normal balance and ambulation.  For two weeks he wore a patch over his right eye because he saw double, but then that symptom also went away.  By the third week he could read again.

His discharge was delayed, however, because he had no place to go except jail, and he couldn’t go there until he reached sufficient physical and mental capacity to be competent and self-reliant.  For several weeks he lingered in the hospital with a sheriff’s deputy stationed at his door.

Each day I would come to see him.  Always he was courteous and cooperative with myself and the staff, and in my mind I tried to reconcile the gentle person before me with the raging lunatic who had killed his young wife.

I asked what would happen to my patient after he was transferred to jail.  The deputy shrugged.  “It’ll be up to the judge,” he said.  “But I think probably nothing.”

“But he murdered his wife,” I said.

“Yeah, but the judge is going to see that scar on his head and send him to a psychiatrist who will say he’s not competent to stand trial, and maybe he’ll go to a state mental hospital, or maybe he’ll just go home.”

I stared at him.  He shrugged again as if to say What are ya gonna do?

The next day I found the patient reading his Bible.  I wondered if he even remembered what he had done.  So I asked.

A cloud passed over his face.  “I killed my wife,” he said.

“Do you remember why?” I asked.

“I was angry.”

His memory was intact, but sometimes patients with temporal and frontal lobe damage will be incapable of remorse.  “How do you feel about that now?” I asked.

The cloud came back.  “I feel bad,” he said.  “I loved her.”  He paused for a moment,  then continued, “I’m not that person anymore.”

In his last statement, he was entirely correct.  Due to his self-inflicted wound, his temporal lobe and frontal lobe were significantly damaged, and changes to his emotional responses and intellectual capabilities were undeniable.  He may be incapable of anger.  In a way, he was broken.  Yet the changes left no outward signs.  Even the scar became hidden as his hair grew back.

I once watched a man in Wyoming break a horse.  The horse was dangerous and useless, but expensive with good breeding and therefore worth saving if at all possible.  As a last resort the horse had been sent to the trainer from New Mexico.  Unless the horse could become trainable and safe, it would be euthanized.

The horse bucked and snorted in his stall before being released to a circular corral about forty feet in diameter.  The man stood in the middle of the corral with only a light six-foot flexible rod and let the horse run around him, seemingly oblivious to the threat of crashing hooves and sharp teeth.  He then described his own life, full of passion and rage and despair, and stated he and the horse were alike until, on the eve of his own self-destruction, he was broken and began a redeemed life.  Over the next hour he talked to us about redemption as he let the horse run, made himself vulnerable to the horse, thereby building trust, and then gave the horse the opportunity to submit.  He never touched the horse with his rod or his hand until near the end of the hour when he faced the now calm animal, stroked his muzzle, and placed a halter on his head.  Then he mounted and rode around the ring.  The horse was no longer the dangerous bucking bronco that had entered the ring.  The changes left no outward sign, but the horse was “broken.”

I know that within myself is a streak that is wild and self-serving and ultimately destructive.  It is the voice that tells me that only I know what is best for myself, that life is short and I need to get what I want now, that I need to free myself from the people and the rules that restrain me.  This voice echoes the wild spirit of the stallion, the spirit that would have led to its destruction, and I expect that it echoes the demon voices that drove my patient to murder.

We all needed that spirit to be broken before we could become whole–at least whole in the sense of fulfilling our best destiny.  In other words, we needed to be broken to be healed.

But I don’t think we can break ourselves.  My patient may have come close by trying to destroy himself.  But the horse needed a gentle trainer.  And I also have a gentle trainer; His name is Jesus.

When we are broken, we can be redeemed from the wild and self-serving spirit that leads to rage and lust and alcohol and drugs and despair, the things that hold us in back from our best selves.  The best of us are broken.

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Sorry

Christina throws a piece of debris far over her head into the already overloaded, over-sized dumpster then screams in pain, clutching at her right shoulder.  Even from twenty yards away I know the shoulder is dislocated.

She is a young woman from Michigan, an EMT and firefighter–an angel really–who had volunteered to come to Middleburg, Florida and coordinate relief efforts for flood victims.  Earlier that day, we met Christina when our motley crew from Crossroad Church arrived at the Middleburg United Methodist Church, and before we divided into teams to go muck out homes.  Strong and beautiful, and she gave us our safety lecture.  She reminded me of my wife and daughter and daughters-in-law: mostly kind but a little fierce.  I wanted to adopt her.

Now I run toward her with no plan.  It has been over forty years since I graduated from medical school, nearly seven since I practiced neurosurgery, and I have never treated a dislocated shoulder.  I could only support her and immobilize the arm.  Between her cries I learned that she had suffered the dislocations before but she had no clue how to fix it.  We both collapse into the mud, kneeling face-to-face, both clutching her right arm.

I suggest the emergency room, but she cries No!  She tells me the longer it stays out, the worse it will be.  I need somebody to put it back it, she says.  Tears streak her cheeks and fall between us.

She doesn’t know me.  To her I am an old man kneeling in the mud with her.  Vague memories of shoulder anatomy float to consciousness as I see her arm where it shouldn’t be, forward with her biceps pointed at a bizarre angle across her chest.  I take her forearm and press down, then rotate her wrist toward me.  She utters another short gasp.  I feel a little click; I hope it is a tendon sliding into place.  Then the arm audibly thunks back into the joint and it is over.

For a few moments neither of us moves.  Greg lays hands on Christina’s shoulder and prays.  Her tears still fall into the mud.  Then she says what I don’t expect: I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.

And I want to hug her and tell her a thousand things–but only one important thing–because I know exactly what she means.

I am like her.  As she runs toward fires, I ran to ERs.  As she resuscitates as an EMT, I operated as a surgeon.  As she volunteers to serve in disaster areas, I volunteered for medical missions.  We want to serve; we want to be heroic.

But there is a thin line between service and self-affirmation.  We become what we do, and when we can’t do it we are lost.  We are ashamed.  We are sorry.

We are “Marthas.”  Martha is the women who, when Jesus is coming to dinner and everybody (including her sister, for crying-out-loud) sits at his feet and listens, is in the kitchen cooking the meal.  Somebody has to do it, Martha thinks, and she is the one who shoulders the responsibility.  Martha wants to get dinner on the table; Christina and I want to muck out that flood-damaged house.  We are doing it for Jesus.  But when we fail, we forget that we are not loved for what we do but for who we are.

Jesus didn’t exactly criticize Martha for her service, but He did tell her that it was more than okay for her sister not to help.  In his gentle rebuke is a reminder: I can feed five thousand people with food out of thin air and turn water into wine.  Your sister knows she is loved; so are you.  You are a child of God.

A few days later, my ninety-eight-year-old mother complains of “indigestion” and general malaise.  My wife, Mary, sits with her for a few hours and realizes this is more than indigestion and calls me and her doctor.  I arrive and take Mom to the emergency care center.  For ten minutes she gasps for breath and clutches her chest as I drive her to the ER.  I know it is the aortic valve disease that has finally thrown her into congestive heart failure, and I fear this is the beginning of the end for her.  In between gasps, she says, I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.

I know exactly what she means.

Mom is okay now.  She’s back in her assisted-living facility, taking care of herself and, in many ways, happier than I have ever seen her.  But her words on the way to the hospital reveal to me how persistent is the feeling that the love we receive is conditional.

God has a different message, one about unconditional love. 

We must know that this is true.  But when we cannot be who we want to be, when our shoulder is on fire and we collapse on our knees in the mud with tears streaming down our cheeks, or when our chest hurts and we can’t breathe, we forget.

It’s okay to cry because we hurt.  Jesus wept, too.  But we never have to cry because we have failed.  I try to tell Christina, and I try to tell Mom: Jesus loves you, just like you are, in sickness or health, injured or whole, strong or weak, serving or listening.

Then every day I try to remind myself.

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After the Seizure: Day 5

Adam

 

I’m home, out of the hospital, and ready to get better. I have to get better. If I don’t all of the plans for my life and our marriage will go out the window.

I’m supposed to get used to the drugs and start feeling less sleepy. Things are supposed to get better. But I remember having cancer, how nothing was ever the same again. I had stared death in the face, lost my hair and a third of my body weight. Then I’d prepared to die bravely.

But now I had no idea of how to coexist with the drugs that suppressed not only my epilepsy, but also my awareness and my emotional affect. I had no idea of how to live with impairment.

The green couch, though splattered with stains from feeding babies, served as a good place to rest while I stared out into space. My two-year-old son and infant daughter hovered in the background, probably making a mess. I’d just called my friend to switch on-call shifts for the last requirement of my CPE, chaplain-training class. In a little while my wife would be home and I would go down for a four or five hour afternoon nap. In one day I’d gone from being a highly autonomous individual with serious responsibilities to being a man who couldn’t drive, couldn’t think straight and couldn’t be trusted to watch his children for more than an hour or two.

My circumstances changed in an instant, but my plans, my identity and my values changed at glacial speed. Throughout CPE training I’d seen myself as one of the smartest and best educated of the students. I’d been selected from over more than twenty people for the single spot in the residency program. My strengths were an ability to listen and “put the dots together.” My classmates described my ability to “put the dots together” as my propensity to hear about an experience ten or fifteen years ago and connect it to something one of my classmates or patients was doing or saying in the present day. I could also write very detailed, in-depth papers about my conversations with patients. My weakness lay in being emotive; even before the drugs I had trouble sharing the emotions of grief or pain with my patients, their families or my fellow students.

It was very important to me to be perceived as being one of the smartest and best educated. I did not want to re-experience the childhood taunts I had suffered as I struggled to overcome dyslexia. In adulthood I wanted to find a profession where my skills and intellect were valued. I’d already been a construction worker, a mailman, a warehouse worker and a teacher. I’d gone to seminary and finished with good grades and good recommendations because I was sure that God loved me and would find a place for me to love Him, serve Him, and maybe even let me take home a paycheck. The chaplaincy seemed like a good fit.

Now, sitting on the green couch in my living room, feeling numb and dumb and tired, I had no idea of how I could continue.

I still struggle to believe it, even now, but much of my suffering came from  illusions and deceptions that I’d constructed about myself. I’d struggled with learning how to read and get through school, so it became very important for me to think of myself as smart and have others perceive me as smart. I’d struggled to find a place in the adult world, so it became very important to think of myself as very qualified as a chaplain or minister, and to provide valuable help to others.

I’d suffered pain, disappointment and frustration. I had to believe that God would use me to alleviate those conditions in others. We always try to give away to others what we want the most for ourselves; it is to us our most precious gift.

What I didn’t know then, and continue to learn now, is that my picture of myself as a smart, super-qualified, valuable helper was going to have to die so that God could rebuild me into His humble servant.

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Forgiving the Innocent

Dean
Adam

 

 

 

 

 

Adam got well.

After a long, hard winter of radiation, infections, a second operation, antibiotics, his hair started growing back–first with wispy strands, finally morphing into a confident mop.  He let it get long; I didn’t object.  He finished his junior year in high school, and we celebrated by going cycling in Europe as a family.  The following year he finished high school and started his first year at a prestigious college in Atlanta.

But I found myself emotionally distanced from him.  A little voice in the back of my mind told me I should be more grateful, more joyful.  I hope I disguised my emotional desert well and did the right things as a father.  It was depression, I told myself, and I’m sure that’s part of it, but the emotional distance from Adam was specific and held a thinly veiled streak of anger.

Many months, perhaps years, passed before I realized my anger was in response to his illness.  He quite unintentionally terrorized me with the specter of grief that came from nearly losing him. And he also held the power to terrorize me again.  I feared to get too close.

But if I were to have an authentic father-son relationship, I had to get over my fear and my anger.  I had to forgive my son for having a brain tumor.  The tumor wasn’t his fault, obviously, and it wasn’t his choice to make me vulnerable or to hurt me.  But emotionally, I somehow held him responsible.

Once I understood that neither Adam, nor his tumor, caused my fear, my anger dissolved easily.  My fear of loss came from something within me, something beyond my ability to give up: the power of love.  And that love is without choice; he was born, I held him, I loved him.

Love is always a risk.  Give your heart away, and it can get weighed down so that it can drag you to the depths and destroy you.  If I were to continue to love him, I had to forgive him–even though he was innocent–and I had to accept the consequences of love.

Forgiving Adam for his tumor is not so much granting absolution as it is granting permission to hurt me again.  It is saying Go ahead, get sick if need be, because I will be there and I will not flinch, I will not distance myself, I will not walk away.  Because fear of loss is the cost of love, the dark side of the coin whose other side is shining joy.  And Adam gives me great joy.

I am awed now by the infinitely better love of our heavenly Father who loves me and forgives me–and I am not innocent.  He gives me permission to get sick, to sin, to live like a prodigal son–not encouragement, but permission–even though what I do may break His heart, cause angels to weep, and the world to become more like hell than heaven.  Yet He promises to be home waiting, ready to get up and run to meet me.  What I now understand in a small way is the cost of that great love, the dark side of the coin He is willing to pay because in some unimaginable way I must give Him great joy.

If this sounds like I am special in the eyes of God, I am.  So is Adam.  But the good news is, so are you.  You give Him great joy.