My four-year-old son sat across the table from me in the hospital cafeteria. Already it had been a long day. We had been with his little sister in the Emergency Room since 8 a.m, and the clock on the wall above his head told us it was now 10:37. Breakfast had just been cleared, lunch now being served, and from the slim pickings arrayed in a rack beside the cash register, he had selected a bag of pretzels. Wearily, I paid for my coffee as well.
He bit a pretzel and, as he chewed, considered the fragment left between his fingers.
“Daddy?” He ventured, his brow furrowed.
“Yes, Son?” I wondered if he was recalling how I had told him a thousand and thirty-seven times not to slam the doors in our house because someone’s finger might get hurt. Someone like his little sister. Though he and I had left the ER, I couldn’t shake the image of my almost two-year-old daughter sitting in my wife’s lap, her little face wet with tears as the doctor examined the gash in her left pinky.
“Daddy, do you think this pretzel looks like a submarine?”
I considered the pretzel with new eyes, tilting my head slightly at an angle.
“I guess it depends on how you look at it.”
He took an even smaller bite.
“Do you think this looks like a chair or…a cat?”
Before I could answer, an alarm flashed from the corner of the cafeteria and a mechanized voice over the intercom intoned, “Code Blue. Code Blue.”
My son grinned for the first time since we had come to the hospital.
“Blue’s my favorite color!”
~
I frequent this hospital, not with my children, but as the pastor of a local church. The day before my daughter’s finger was treated in the ER, I had visited a young father before his back surgery and then stood beside a 96-year-old woman in ICU. His operation went well. She died a few hours later.
In between those visits, I sat in an orphaned metal folding chair left along the far wall of the main lobby. The room was a giant funnel. People of different ages and races poured in from the outside. The nurses’ scrubs and the patients’ gowns were all the same, but I watched a whirl of coats and ties, blue jeans and skull caps, sweatpants and do-rags, cowboy boots and MAGA hats, as well as hijabs, saris, and halter tops stream into the building. In line at the information desk, a slim man under his yarmulke meditatively rubbed his grey beard behind a motorcycle dude whose sleeveless shirt revealed a demon tattoo on his shoulder. I rose from the chair and went to pray.
The interfaith chapel is located just outside the wing of the children’s hospital. After the frenetic pace in the lobby, entering is like slipping underwater. Sounds outside are muffled, the lights are dimmed. My eyes always take a few moments to adjust. Yeats would say Peace comes dropping slow.
In an ordinary three-ringed binder, prayers are scrawled across the pages in different shades of ink. This is the Bible Belt, so there’s plenty of appeals to Jesus. Also prayers in other languages, perhaps to gods of whom I’ve never heard. I often thumb through the pages rapidly, like a flip book, watching the colors and words blur together like people rushing through the lobby. Like time itself.
During this particular visit, I was alone with my prayers for my parishioners and their families. As I wrote their first names in blue ink on a clean sheet of paper, the silence was interrupted by the intercom:
“Code Blue. Code Blue.”
~
The next day, after the intercom in the cafeteria had fallen silent, my son resumed taking strategic bites of his pretzels. He declared that he had made a car, a tank, and an albatross.
He loves the albatross because of his animal book, which informs us that an albatross has the longest wingspan of any bird in the world. My son loves superlatives, anything that is the longest, biggest, or fastest. With his arms stretched as far as he can reach, he flies around the kitchen, occasionally knocking dishes off the table and his little sister to the ground. She has burst into tears plenty of times and, once, busted her lip. Today was the first time we had raced down the road to the ER.
I decided for the direct approach and asked if he wanted to talk about how he had slammed the door on his sister’s finger. He shook his head.
“I don’t want to talk about hard things.”
As he returned his focus to his pretzels, I remembered yesterday’s conversation with the adult son beside his mother’s ICU bed. The doctors had just told him that, most likely, she would not survive the surgery. If she did, she would certainly be bed-bound for the rest of her life. The son had declined this invasive option and the palliative care team had taken over “to make her comfortable” and allow her to die. This parishioner, his voice cracking, shared how the doctors would have “made a full court press” to keep his mother alive.
“But,” he sighed, “there are things worse than death.”
A decade of ministry and hospital visits have taught me to recognize a hard truth when I hear one.
My son brought me back to the moment. I smiled when I heard him echo what I had said about his pretzel.
“Depends on how you look at it. Depends on how you look at it.”
I figured that was decent spiritual advice, too.
~
The way I look at it, every trip to the hospital, whether as visitor or patient, invites the opportunity to consider one’s own mortality. Memento mori—remember that you must die. There are strains in Christian theology that used this concept to emphasize the afterlife, such as a billboard on the interstate that asks, If you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven or hell?
Life is fragile. In a moment, a little finger gets wedged in a door jam. Other tragedies are far worse. Still, an awareness of our finitude can prompt gratitude as well as fear.
This fall, our family created a sign of gratitude in the center of our dining room table. This particular pumpkin, having been spared the carving knife at Halloween, served to record a list of what we are thankful for. With a black Sharpie, my wife penned the kids’ answers in a snaking line around the pumpkin: rocket ships, worms, owls, Saturdays, PJs, candy, best friends, dance parties…
Of course, the list eventually ended. And so, one day, will my life. Memento mori.
There is a history of colon cancer on both sides of my family, which means next year, at the age of forty, I’ll make a trip to the hospital for my first colonoscopy. Mom and Dad have been submitting to these exams for years. They tell me that it’s not pleasant, particularly the preparation. I don’t like to dwell on those details.
Dad is a pastor but, in this case, Mom gives spiritual advice. Actually, she models it. A few days before the procedure, she sits alone on their back deck with a view of the small pond. And considers the terrible possibility: What if she is told that she has an aggressive, inoperable cancer? What if she learns she has only a few more months to live?
Mom doesn’t dwell upon this hypothetical. As a spiritual discipline, remembering that you must die is not like sounding the alarm and dropping everything else. She teaches me that the value of memento mori is that, afterwards, she is less concerned about ultimately trivial details, like stress at work, and more grateful for what is truly valuable, like her family.
Mom teaches me that reflecting upon my inevitable death can improve my quality of life.
~
A little after 11 a.m. more patrons filed into the cafeteria for lunch, and my wife texted that the orthopedist had finished stitching our daughter’s finger. My son insisted on carrying the bag of pretzels with him. “My sister might want one,” he explained solemnly.
To return to the ER, he and I had to walk through the main lobby. I only wanted to get back to the rest of our family and on with our day, week, life. But my son stopped in the middle of this river of rushing humans.
I hope he will not slam any more doors. I pray we don’t rush to the ER again. I know time rolls on and the future unfolds as it will toward the inevitable—death.
And I will remember this moment: when the intercom once again called out the code in his favorite color, my son grabbed my hand.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman serves as poet pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His fourth book, Gently Between the Words, will be published in 2019.
