JUNE 2024 - Believing/Seeing

I was home after spending 19 days in a London hospital, saved from dying from an undiagnosed illness by seven different antibiotics and more blood transfusions than my body could tolerate. Sent home so doctors in the US could diagnose an underlying undiagnosed illness.

I was home, alone, after being taken care of by a neighbor for a week, exhausted from family phone calls--relatives wanting me to visit my mother who was ill, not believing I was ill. 
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I was home, alone, when the phone rang. A colleague from the university, who was also an ordained minister, heard about my illness, could he please come visit. He had attended a storymaking workshop for faculty that I led and taken an interest in the stories I told, often complaining that I left out important connections.  I said this was so listeners could fill in the blanks, an explanation that never satisfied him. Still, we’d developed a kind of friendship so when he asked to come see me, I agreed. Ungraciously. “Okay, but no platitudes please.”

We were sitting on the deck on a sunny day in early March. He asked how I was. Too tired to lie I said, “When I look inside me, all I see are dead trees, barren ground, and darkness. There’s no life left inside me.” When he started to object, I interrupted and said, “No sermons, please. I see what I see. I feel what I feel.”

He knew better than to argue with me. Instead, he took my soft cold hands into his big warm calloused hands. “Look at your hands. What do you see?” he asked.

“Cold bluish hands.”

He gently held my hands until they were warm. “Now what do you see?” he asked.

“Warm pinkish hands.”

“That’s life,” he said. “If you can’t see it, you have to believe that under the dark, seemingly barren landscape, new life is forming.”

“I can’t see what’s not there to see.”

“You might be looking but you’re not seeing.”

“There’s nothing to see. I’m dying and I’m too tired to care.” 

“I care,” he said, hesitating only for a second before he added, “Your students care.”

“They’ll find other teachers.”

“Not like you. You’re the only professor who’s a storyteller. You know better than anyone that the stories we tell ourselves shape what and how we see.”

“You need to go. I’m too tired to talk.”

“Okay,” he said, “but promise me you’ll believe what I see in you until you can see it yourself.”

I agreed, more to end the visit than from any faith he was right.

That was 39 years ago.


Has someone seen something in you that you couldn’t see or feel?

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JUNE 2024 MOnthly Stories