You Are Loved © Craig Dahlberg
My neurosurgeon declared my back a disaster zone. “You’ve got major problems in every part of your back, all the way down.” My MRI agreed; weird twists, turns and dead ends. Doc said it best, “Your back looks like a pack mule’s path down into the mine.”
As the Los Angeles firestorm raged a few miles from my hospital room, needles had invaded veins in both my hands in preparation for my back surgery. Pain clawed my brain. The world around me—my body, other hospital patients, caregivers, and all those fighting flames—seemed to struggle against a rapidly darkening place.
A newly arrived nursing assistant had just started her shift. She was a woman with a big presence and even bigger false eyelashes. Needing relief, I asked her to tell me something interesting about herself.
“Honey,” she bellowed, “I just love people! I love helping people! I can’t help it! I just love people!”
My “dark place” violently imploded. She was just the cure I needed. God had worked overtime to intersect our lives at this moment.
But when the hospital shift changed, a different, more subdued and thoughtful nurse took charge of me. I soon discovered the reason for her demeanor. Because I asked, she showed me her family portrait—a handsome couple with their 3-year-old son. Last month, her husband’s father passed away from an inherited disorder causing glandular tumors.
Then, just last week, she discovered her son had inherited the same incurable condition. He faces lifelong vigilance and surgeries. As she told me her story, her face was resolute, unblinking, stoic.
As we talked, I began to think. How many people hold the cures for what ails others, if they would only reach out to them? And how many needy people have I passed by, never offering the help they needed and I could give?
I turned to look at my roommate. Helpless and diapered, nurses had to occasionally assist him in his bedridden state. But that triggered fierce coughing, which induced long bouts of vomiting.
Of course, I could hear through the privacy curtain when his daughter came to visit. He was confused, unable to connect the dots in their conversation. “What are your wishes?” she asked repeatedly and emphatically, like he was a child.
That was easy. He wanted to go back home.
“But that’s not a choice, Dad. I meant, which hospice facility do you prefer?”
He did not answer.
The next day, his wife visited him. She gushed with emotion. “Honey, I just love you so much!”
After a long silence, he sighed and muttered, “Oh, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?” she replied, confused.
“I don’t know. This might be the end.” Although he was speaking of his own life, his voice contained no hint of desperation, no anxiety, not a touch of fear. His pain seemed to push his heart into a new orbit. Perhaps he saw more clearly than anyone else around him.
Because of his suffering and commotion, the nurses offered to move me to a quieter room. I declined. Though we could no longer converse very much, we understood one another.
But, as I was wheeled out of the hospital to go home, I paused at the foot of his bed. I stared into his face and gave both his big toes a squeeze; he nodded and smiled back at me.
I know, and you know, that when our physical bodies reach the boundaries of their human capacity, hope can become stretched thin. But in that weakened place, those squeezes, nods, and smiles reach our deepest place. They carry the expressions of love, the best gift that God offers us. And they are the best we can offer to others.
Big Eyelashes, Brave Nurse, Distressed Roommate, the Firefighters — you all carried the same message: You Are Loved.