Glimmers of Hope And A Journey Wrapped in Love

She spoke softly and hesitantly as I worked through my list of triage questions. We reviewed her medical history and I discovered she’d had a heart attack with full cardiac arrest. I stared at her young face.

“You’re too young to have this history!” I exclaimed. She nodded, and in her quiet voice told me about collapsing at the doctor’s office. Her heart had stopped pumping. The staff were not accustomed to such excitement and it took them a while to get the equipment and processes started to save her life. “So I was dead for like 10 minutes,” she said softly.

I knew the line for triage was growing, but couldn’t help asking. “Did you see that light at the end of the tunnel or anything?” She sat silently for a minute and nodded. “Yeah”, she glanced down. “I saw a light and I felt completely enveloped in Love. I didn’t used to believe in God or anything, but now… there must be something.”

The experience made her rescue almost frustrating. She finds herself alive but in a broken body, living with the scars of her brush with death. She longs for the light that held her so tenderly. But she figures she must be alive for a reason.

———–

I don’t remember a lot of faces, but I remember his. He looks at me out of yellow eyes set in flesh yellowed by terminal cancer. Behind the unnatural hue of his eyes grief mingles with fear. Sitting around his hospital room, his family have been discussing life after death. He chuckles but then his countenance grows heavy and even his eyes seem to sigh.

“I guess I’ll find out pretty soon.”

I’m not good with heavy moments. But I pull up my little round stool on wheels and lean on the rail of his bed. I look in his sad face. I tell him the story of the young girl whose journey started in Love. And there behind the yellow and the grief and the fear I see something new- a glimmer of hope.

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