A Visit to the Hospital

Oh Iowa, how I love you!  My second week back in the state and the temperatures were frigid.  Between the single digit thermometer numbers and wind chill, my old dog and I decided not to walk a neighborhood yet this week.  We could have toughed it out, but with a cozy house, and a pot of coffee, why?

Nevertheless, I walked yesterday.  A friend had sudden surgery and so I spent a few hours in the hospital with family and friends.  Hospitals are fascinating spaces.  They seem designed to disorient and confuse.  They have odd little jogs in the hallways and often the expected pattern of rooms is disrupted.  You turn a corner, thinking you will find the next six room numbers and find a blank wall instead.

There were nurses, doctors, patients, families, volunteers and friends.  People were walking everywhere.  I walked hallways in a round of rooms and prayed for health and for healing, but as I walked, I noticed something that movies never capture. This is a warm hospital: carpets instead of linoleum, low light instead of bright flourescents.  There is nothing antiseptic, sterile, cold, or unfeeling in this space.  This hospital is not a place of despair and hopelessness.  Instead, it feels like a place of healing.  The warm professionalism of the hospital staff and volunteers exuded calm and compassion.  People who have seen it all saying with their body language, "Do not fear."  Though likely hurting, most of the patients I saw had determined and engaged looks on their faces.  They were people getting well.  Walking themselves out of the hospital.

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James Jen

Walking, my mind made a turn.  There are days when I start to wish that life were different.  That people wouldn't get sick.  That bills didn't exist.  That the weather was never too cold or too hot.  That I didn't have so many chores, so many obligations, so few hours in a given day.  That poverty and war were the fairy tales.  I start arranging my schedule and organizing my time.  I start spending days doing actions, and imagining a life lived walking on a beach and drinking margaritas.

There are days like that, but as I walked, I was reminded: it is a privilege to be with sick friends in the hospital.  It is a privilege to walk beside a recovering partner.  It is a gift and a privilege to be breakable, to be needed, to play a part and to fill a role.  These are all side effects of a life lived in relationship with other people.  Money, success, power, control and invulnerability don't fill the Spirit the way being a friend can.  It is the humps and bumps, the struggles and the shifts, the losses and the pains that tell us who and whose we are.  Loss is because love is, and what I saw most in the hospital yesterday was love. A corporate love expressed in that huge institution totally dedicated to an idea that people can and should get well.  An intimate love expressed by family and friends gathered, in fear, yes, but mostly in faith, in hope and in an assurance that, no matter the outcome of the surgery, all would be well.

Now, on to the laundry.



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