Love and Devastation and a January Snow

Last winter I left the North Carolina mountains and drove to the North Carolina coast to spend the next several months in Wilmington and skip winter, because I guess I’ve turned into a whiner who doesn’t like ice, wind, sleet, freezing rain, wind, cold, or wind.

“If it would just snow,” I’ve been known to say longingly. I do love snow. To me, snow can be like a party waiting to happen. Except…there are inopportune times, and just as I was trying to leave, that big old snow finally came in. I got out in time, though. Driving past the Blue Ridge Parkway, the flurries were pretty intense, so I took it easy and let my Honda Element, Merletta, safely carry us down off the mountain and into non-snowy weather, “us” being my cat, Maisey, and a huge black dog, Koda, that I was fostering for some dear friends.

Anyway, as snow flew at the windshield and the wipers whipped back and forth, I thought, “This ain’t nothin’,” because my barometer for driving in snow is one January night in 1990 in Columbus, Ohio. I was doing my chaplaincy then at the Children’s Hospital, and having a hard time. Our supervisor was an ex-Marine and we were all a little terrified of him. He never yelled or anything like that. It was way worse. There was a quiet power about him, he seethed with barely-concealed judgment. He could be brutally confrontational and honest, which is extremely distressing when you are trying to navigate how to be fully present with sick and dying children and their families, and you know you have no clue what you are doing.

This was early in my five-month tenure at Children’s, and I was still reeling from the previous week’s 15-hour odyssey of a journey with a family whose 4-year-old boy, K., had suffered an aneurysm and subsequently had to be removed from life support, and because I’d left the hospital before he died, my supervisor sharply chastised me and accused me of chickening out at the worst possible moment and abandoning the family when they needed me most, which I had.

Let me just say, this was the same hospital where my son, Cooper, had surgery to repair a heart defect when he was four days old, and where, until I began my chaplaincy, I hadn’t set foot inside during the seven years since Cooper died. But after K. I stuck like glue to the children and their families and vowed to walk with them all the way through whatever terrible terrain they faced. I was not going to abandon anyone again.

Our supervisor had assigned me to be on call for the ER on Saturdays, which, if you don’t know, seems to be when a whole lot of shit can rain down. I had to carry a pager, which felt like walking around with a live grenade with the pin removed, just waiting for it to go off, which almost always meant something catastrophically bad. I felt inadequate and inept. The intensity of the long hours with dying children felt annihilating, too close to the memories of my own son’s death. I had to steel myself to think of being able to do it.

On this particular Saturday in January, it had started to snow in the afternoon, enormous, feather-sized flakes, and mounds of the stuff were accumulating quickly on the roads. The pager had been blessedly quiet, but my on-call shift would last till midnight, and what if I got paged in the evening but couldn’t make the twenty minute drive? It wasn’t like there was a backup plan. I was the on-call chaplain for the ER that night, and I knew for my supervisor there would be exactly zero acceptable excuses for not being there. I went back and forth, watching snow pile up, and finally I packed an overnight bag and kissed husband and kids goodbye and got in my minivan and headed out. It was around 7:00 p.m. then and dark, snow still coming down in buckets.

Columbus’s Northwest Boulevard is a sort of main artery, a lovely four-lane road that winds through neighborhoods and connects the suburbs to a series of freeway ramps and downtown. That night the boulevard was covered by about six inches of snow and counting. I drove clutching the steering wheel and leaned forward, trying to see past the slashing wipers and the fogged-up glass, but it was such a complete whiteout that the vehicle lights reflected rather than pierced the densely falling snow. I felt the minivan gliding from lane to lane beneath me and thanked the heavens above that nobody else was crazy enough to be out driving. I’d be in the middle of what I thought was a curve, only to discover I was actually on the other side of the road.

Finally, I rolled down my window and stuck my head out, able to see and navigate better that way, and that’s how I got myself to the hospital. It was a quiet night except for a toddler who was dehydrated from a Rotavirus and needed IV fluids, and the weary mom just needed someone to pat her hand and help comfort the frightened child. That night I slept on the small fold-out couch in the Pastoral Care office and drove home Sunday morning through slushy streets with a bright, blue sky overhead.

On my trip down to Wilmington, I listened to Faith, Hope, and Carnage, 40 hours of Irish journalist Sean O’Hagan’s intimate and searingly honest interviews with Australian musician, writer, and filmmaker Nick Cave distilled into a book. Cave ruminates, in a mind-opening take, on how the 2015 death of his fifteen-year-old son utterly remade him, and about art and God and hope and his mystical take on the deep and very real interconnectedness of the human family. Spirit and dimensions and all kinds of good stuff along with traditional Bible and Jesus and forgiveness and redemption.

Cave’s interview struck me hard, because as I drove along, recalling that wild, snowy evening back in 1990, I was naturally led to reflect on my time at Children’s, and I realized how I still carry those children with me, the eight who died on my watch as well as the ones whose suffering I witnessed but whose stories I never got to know the end of. I carry them all and I always will, because our lives intersected where life and death overlap, in that place of the shadowiest valley and the Thin Veil, where we gave some parts of ourselves to each other. Where, like Nick Cave, we were all remade in some way by traversing that sharp and ragged landscape of loss and devastation, and where love lives on, even among the ruins.