Midnight
I sit in my car outside Dell Children’s Hospital, just a stone’s throw away from my home in Austin, Texas. Rain falls in heavy sheets and the dark sky lights up every few seconds as deep-toned thunder rolls in. It’s almost midnight. Only a few hospital rooms stacked on multiple floors still have lights glowing.
I hope the children are not frightened by the storm.
My wife and I brought our daughter to the Emergency Room after she experienced severe abdominal pain that did not relent. Due to COVID-19 protocols, only one parent can accompany a child inside the ER, so after providing insurance information and checking my daughter in, I go sit in the car, periodically texting with my wife and daughter as we all await the doctor’s arrival.
Eight excruciating hours later, which included multiple exams and imaging, we learn that my daughter’s condition is nothing serious and should abate quickly.
Letting out a deep sigh and rubbing my heavy, red, slightly burning eyes, a poem I wrote recently comes to mind:
Daybreak
The River
Fresh sunlight
Touches the shallow river,
Its waters flowing toward
Places not yet known.
A warm June breeze blows,
Waking brushy hilltops
Dry from hot
Spring days and nights.
A mourning dove
Sits on a rock and coos,
Calling out to the waters
Snaking through tall banks.
Life unfolds as the river flows,
With waters tranquil and troubled.
What lies around the bend
We do not know.[1]
New Day
We get in the car and start the one-mile trip home as the new day’s sun reveals a now clear sky. Pulling out of the hospital parking lot, fighting off sleep, I notice one hospital room, its light still burning from the night before. My mind drifts to the child and the loved ones surely gathered in the room. A pediatric hospital is a place of long days and sometimes longer nights. It is a place of worry, anger, disbelief, and heartache, a place where both good news and bad news are delivered, where everyone waits and hopes.
I swallow hard as we pull away from the hospital.
Approaching our home, I see the dim glow of a single light, which we left on in case our other teenaged daughter awakened before we returned home. I look momentarily at her bedroom window, where she still sleeps, and then peer into the rearview mirror, where my wife has our younger daughter tucked under her chin. I pull into our driveway, park, and take from my pocket a tablet of carbidopa/levodopa, my Parkinson’s wonder drug, which my sleepless and stiff body knows I am late taking.
Life feels more precious and delicate than it did just a few hours before.
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Photo by Wolf Zimmermann on Unsplash
[1] This poem appears in Allan Hugh Cole Jr., In the Care of Plenty: Poems (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021), forthcoming.