Yesterday

Yesterday morning my friend of forty-plus years broke her blog silence with a lovely post about how she met her husband. It would have been their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. She wrote about their courtship, his hopes for the future, and recaptured the feelings of a college girl, meeting a man and knowing her life was about to change. Near the end of her post, she wrote, "I don't intend to make this a story of our marriage, which was cut short by his death in a car accident when he was only thirty-eight. He was teaching at [the university] by that time and working on his doctoral dissertation We had three girls and a boy on the way when that happened. It was a terrible loss, of course. I had never thought that one could survive such a thing, but we did. He had given me that strength."

On and off throughout the day, I thought about my friend's post. At the time we met, she was a single mom with four pre-pubescent and pre-pre-pubescent kids. I was young, not-long-married, and full of my own hopes. I seldom thought of what her life had been before we met.

Her post stayed with me throughout the day. I thought of this young woman, alone with all of this responsibility. I wondered how she had been able to get out of bed each morning. "He had given me that strength."

In the afternoon, I went to work at the hospital. When my colleague gave me report of his day, after mentioning a need for an advance directive and a couple of minor traumas, he said, "We had a real tragedy here today. A young man, 32-years-old, collapsed at the gym with cardiac arrest. He leaves three young children."

My stomach tightened. Not because it reminded me of my old friend, but because somehow, instinctively, I knew who the man, the children, the wife were. My colleague didn't say any names, but I knew. I kept it to myself, I remained professional, and only after John had left and I was alone in the on-call room did I have the courage to unfold the hand-off sheet. The name there was the one I expected.

There's a young woman at our church who is involved and active among the younger set. She's stylish and attractive; no, she is just downright cute. She's so adorable that she was able to show up at worship without trying to cover the ingrowing hair that follows chemotherapy. For this woman has spent the past months recovering from breast cancer. At her age. Her children (5, 3, and 1 respectively) are beautiful and fashionably dressed. Her husband was equally handsome in his own way, and obviously adored her. A family for a magazine cover.

Two questions bombarded my brain. How had I known it was him? There must be thousands of 32-year-old men with three children. And how will she be able to get out of bed in the morning? I pray that He has given her that strength.

I went about my work. Fortunately, it was a stress-free shift. I spent an hour with a woman concerned about her sick mother's future. I discussed an advance directive with another woman. I delivered a Bible to a very nice man and prayed for his healing. A moment of panic when a pediatric trauma was called turned to gratitude that the trampolinist wasn't seriously hurt. And then it was time to go home to my husband, who I held a bit more tightly than usual.