What I Learned in the Waiting Room
Posted by Matthew Archbold in Family on Wednesday, March 18, 2009 9:00 AM
Everything I needed to know about love I learned in a hospital waiting room.
It all started with a pause. You see, my father was a quiet man. Never complained. Old school tough. So when my mother asked him if she should call the ambulance and he hesitated, we all knew it was bad.
Seated in his favorite chair he stared forward, heaving and wheezing every breath. I know he wanted to say no. He wanted to tell everyone to calm down. But he paused and that was enough. My mother was already dialing the phone when he finally nodded.
We learned later that his lungs were filling with water making it increasingly difficult to breathe and the strain on his heart was enormous. He was rushed to the hospital in cardiac arrest.
The family followed closely behind. One remarkable thing in this cell phone era is how quickly even a big Irish Catholic family can gather. Within a few hours all six sons and one sister from all across the country stood with my mother next to my father’s emergency room bed.
Under an arthritic tangle of tubes and wires, my father smiled as his children joked. We didn’t know what was wrong yet, but we all acted as if the crisis had passed. That’s the secret to why Irish wakes are a party. It’s the only time the Irish gather when you’re guaranteed not to hear a sad story. We’re all trying to forget why we’re there.
But my father suddenly went from smiling to distress. An alarm urgently dinged and my oldest brother called for a nurse, a doctor. Anyone.
Men and women in scrubs bustled in past us. One nurse shooed us all away in a loud and insistent voice, and we retreated like tamed lions. From where I stood on the edge of the waiting room, I could still see my mother and father through a gap in the curtains.
I could see her mouth moving. I’m sure she was praying, but I never asked her. My mother is always praying.
But when I looked down at my mother’s hand, I saw something that changed my life. My father was patting my mother’s hand.
Unable to breathe, he stared at her consolingly and patted her hand beneath his own. In what he surely thought were his last moments on Earth, my father comforted my mother.
That is love.
The curtain closed and I remember looking around the waiting room at the heavy-eyed faces disinterestedly reading colorful magazines, watching a silent soap opera play itself out on the television above our heads, and one woman praying her Rosary.
They were all there because they loved someone. And although they’d rather be anywhere else in the world, they needed to be as close as they could be to the person they loved.
My father was saved that day by great care and a thousand prayers. He lived another five years for which we were all grateful.
But my mind often goes back to that day when that waiting room was illuminated with grace. Everything in this suffering world made a triumphant sort of sense. It was the reality of the Cross in our lives, the triumph of love over pain. Over death.
That, I think, is why the broken form of our Savior in the arms of his Mother is one which explains the world to me better than any other image. It reminds me that suffering and love are inextricably tied; that we are called to love and the cost of love is suffering. Ironically, the only remedy to that pain consuming us is … yes … to make the decision to love even more yet again.
My father was a quiet man who taught me everything I needed to know about love without saying a word.
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