A Stitch in Time

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I needed the moment, wanted it badly and practically dreamed about it, and when it finally came I was petrified. But now I’m grateful that it came, and I don’t need that moment again. It was a stitch in time, as the saying goes.

I was at the hospital giving support to someone having a procedure. The surgeon, I had already learned, was Debra’s surgeon years earlier when she had cancer. I considered him then and still do now to be a wonderful doctor with a laser focus on each of his patients and a charismatic gleam in his eye that gives you hope and confidence for the future. But things didn’t go the way anyone wanted, and cancer hurts more than just the patient. We were all exhausted and disappointed, and our last visit with the doctor was tense. After the funeral, I wrote a letter thanking him for all that he had done over those months. I enclosed a small piece of art depicting St. Francis of Assis that Debra brought home from a trip to Italy between surgeries. I believed Debra would want him to have it because they shared a love of Italy.

And then a decade rolled by and there I was, sitting in a waiting room, and I heard his familiar voice and saw him from across the room and I could hardly breathe. “Oh . . . . ,” I thought. “This is really happening.”

He walked over to the family and was introduced around including to me and then there was more doctor-patient talk the way there is in those moments. I thought it was over and I would just leave it and not say anything about our past connection. But then he looked at me and asked, “Are you a doctor? You look familiar to me.” And there was the moment, finally, and I took it. I told him who I was and I spoke Debra’s name. His body slumped a little and he covered his mouth as he thought and I could see it all come rushing back to him. At that moment I think he might have been as shaken and nervous as me. I patted him on the back and thanked him for all he had done those dozen years ago. And then he said it: “I never get over the ones I lose.”

And then we were back in the here and now and I could breathe again. I was relieved and grateful, even though the meeting churned up emotions and thoughts that I hadn’t had in a long time. I don’t know what the moment meant to him, but for me it added a stitch to a wound that was still open.

A friend posted a while back that people keep asking her, in so many words, “When are you going to get over your loss?” Her loss was more recent and totally unexpected; mine was a decade ago and stretched over months with plenty of warning. There’s not much in common with our situations, but I told her what I know: You don’t have to get over your loss, and in fact you never will and you shouldn’t even try. Love is not about getting over a loss; it’s about living with it. Even when you’ve been blessed with immeasurable joy as I have, there will be remembrances lurking. And there will be wounds that will never heal completely, but sometimes something may happen that adds another stitch.