After a cancellation unexpectedly moved up my husband Warren’s scheduled hip surgery and complications prolonged his recovery, I spent the last nine nights with him in the hospital.
With one phone call, our preparation time shrank from three weeks to three hours; we called the dog sitter, canceled plans, touched base with family and friends. Then, as his anticipated three-night stay extended, we entered unfamiliar territory, navigating new vocabulary and a host of nurses and doctors, the ground shifting under our feet daily if not hourly. The sociologist Arthur Frank has a term for this kind of disruption and disorientation: narrative wreckage. The present is no longer what the past was supposed to lead up to, and the future is scarcely thinkable.
I’m not unaccustomed to hospitals, neither as a pastor nor as the spouse of a frequent flier. But this longer stay, with its heightened uncertainty and anxiety, has given me a new appreciation for what gets us through difficult times. I could write a book about the lessons of the last 10 days — and I even have a title picked out, thanks to my daughter’s coinage of a word describing my particular circumstances during the pandemic lockdown: “Warrentine.”
So, as a preview of that future bestseller, here are a few thoughts on hospitality, humor, and hope.
The words hospital, hospitality, hospitable, and hospice share the same Latin root, hospes, which means “host.” We practice hospitality when we make someone feel at home. It’s a tall order in an institutional setting, so I appreciated every kindness, large and small, from the medical team, staff, fellow patients, and caregivers, to the person on the phone taking Warren’s lunch order and the employees at Panera and Chick-fil-A where I got a lot of my meals. In one memorable encounter, one of the housekeeping staff arrived while Warren was wheeled out of the room for a test. Taking advantage of the open space, Darrell encouraged me to stay put on the couch finishing Warren’s leftover fruit cup while he mopped the floor. I said I was grateful for the invitation to relax, and Darrell said that creating space for that kind of peace is what he tries to do. We talked about ministry, and the wisdom he learned from his mother and grandmother. Those few moments of connection and meaning restored and fortified me.
Even in the midst of stress and fear, laughter is the best medicine. An ongoing source of amusement during the week was a video monitoring system being piloted on the unit. A remote human “Observer” had a camera trained on Warren in case he needed something when no one else was in the room. If the nursing staff arrived to assist him, the Observer would come onscreen and ask if they needed privacy, and would sometimes check in to make sure Warren was OK. I joked with a friend that he seemed to be listening better to the Observer than to me, and that I was tempted to take it home to encourage ongoing cooperation. Once when I was helping Warren with something, the Observer asked him if he’d rather she call his nurse!
Whether in person, or in emails, texts or phone calls, I treasured every attempt to inject some humor into our circumstances — and the sensitivity to know when seriousness was called for.
And finally, hope is indispensable. Knowing we were surrounded by a network of loved ones, feeling the love and prayers of family, friends, and the faith community, made all the difference. Since I couldn’t make it to church last Sunday, I joined those watching our service on YouTube. Just as our associate rector Joshua Nelson was beginning his sermon, a crew of nurses arrived for another procedure, and I had to pause. “God is present even in the moments we feel weakest,” Josh was saying. “Suffering will be transformed into joy: that’s the good news. Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but we have to hold onto it.”
While I fervently hope my ongoing “Warrentine” doesn’t include another week like this one, I know that more trials lay ahead, for all of us. Another powerful moment of our time in the hospital came during a Zoom book discussion with parishioners. Our room was very close to the helipad, and suddenly we heard the loud whirring sound of a patient arriving for treatment. “That was me in May,” said a woman in our group whom I had visited after she came to the hospital in one of those very helicopters. Being on the receiving end of pastoral care this time has made me acutely aware of how much we all need tending, both in our times of crisis and in the bumps and bruises of daily life. We need each other.
Writing this past week in The Christian Century, Debie Thomas reflects on the “hopes, hungers, losses, and loves” that bring us to our knees. “Whether we use religious language to describe it or not,” she says, “we are starving for coherence, for awe, for connection, for meaning. We are still hungry for spaces, rituals and rhythms that will help us beat despair and recover wonder. We need questions worth pondering and truths worth trusting. We still need containers spacious enough to hold our pain.”
May we be such holding spaces for each other.
The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.
