Hospitals

We arrived at our local hospital at dawn. Fred was to get injections in his neck again. As we waited for him to go in for his procedure, I looked out the window across a courtyard to a row of windows on the other side. I thought of my sister and her last days in a hospital. Through each of those windows is a life, a person with family, a person fearful and in pain. What untold suffering is contained in this building where I stand? Lord, have mercy on your people.

I hate hospitals. I feel contaminated by illness just being here. The air is polluted with disease and despair. I tell the girls not to touch anything and I want to take their young healthy bodies and run out the door far from the decay I feel here. My sister, with her job in the lab, spent her whole adult life working in a hospital. Then she died in the same place. She didn't want that and had asked her husband not to take her to the hospital when the end was near, but in his fear he did what he thought best.

I worked in a hospital for several years in my former life as a nurse. I know the suffering and pain, the dying and death. As a young woman, it terrified me and I never got used to it. Big events happen in hospitals--people are made unconscious and their bodies cut and probed. Invisible rays are blasted into brains and lungs and bones. Babies enter the world, but not always into ideal circumstances. Fearful mothers, fathers, husbands and wives surround bedsides of those they love to comfort and to wait--for life or for healing or for death.

The girls and I are in Paneras again having breakfast while we wait for Fred. The early morning sun bursts boldly across our table. People with fresh faces order coffee and bagels and laugh and talk about their upcoming day. Death looms only a couple of blocks away. We all ignore it. We know our ultimate fate but turn our eyes away and live our lives--for me, with gratitude for each day we have the people we love with us, for each day we have good health. We can't dwell on death, but the black cloud hanging at the horizon reminds us to embrace the life God's given us, for each of the unknown number of days we have.

"If a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. " Ecclesiastes 11:8.