It was Friday, April 6, 2007. I was still in the intensive care unit at United Hospital in St. Paul. I was feeling less disoriented with each passing hour and was able to focus a little better. The nurses told me that if all went well, I'd be moving to out of the ICU and into a regular room by the end of the day.
Slowly I was starting to re-engage with the world a little bit. It was Good Friday, but it seemed like an abstraction more than something real. Perhaps it's a function of created memory, but it always seemed to me that the weather always turned bad in the afternoon. I remember it raining many times and thunderstorms coming through at least a few times. As a child, I always assumed it was a sign that God was angry about Jesus dying on the Cross.
In 2007, it was a different weather phenomenon. Everyone was telling me how cold it was out there -- the nation was in the grip of a cold wave that extended all the way to Augusta, Georgia, where the Masters was taking place. As I watched coverage of the tournament, the golfers were all bundled in jackets and the galleries were sporting winter jackets. A hard freeze reached all the way down to North Carolina, causing millions of dollars in damage. Everyone I talked to was telling me that winter was back.
None of that mattered much to me, though. I knew that I was getting better, but I was starting to feel a little scared about the future. I didn't have any money coming in and with potentially months of recovery and hospital bills coming, this was going to be tough. Not much seemed good about this particular Friday.
As is always the case in the ICU, a lot of people were coming into the room. At one point I had a visitor I hadn't seen before. Although you wouldn't necessarily know it from the name, United is a Catholic hospital and was known as St. Luke's before it merged with Miller Hospital a number of years ago. And on one of the most important days of the year for a Christian, one of my visitors was a deacon from a nearby parish who served as a Communion minister. He came to my room and we said a short prayer together. Then he gave me Holy Communion.
I really couldn't chew or swallow, so I let the Host slowly dissolve on my tongue. As it did, I continued to pray. I knew that many, many people were praying on my behalf as well. And at that moment, I started to feel a sense of calm that I hadn't felt in many days. The fear I had started to dissipate.
Catholics are called to profess their faith, but they aren't always very good at it. I suppose there are reasons for that, but at that moment all the teachings I'd had over the first 43 years of my life seemed to lock into place. That sense of calm would make a big difference in my recovery.
Later in the afternoon, I was moved from the ICU to a room on the surgical ward. The room had a huge window wall with a view of the St. Paul Cathedral and, in the distance, the Minnesota State Capitol, the twin landmarks of St. Paul. It was a better view than I'd had before. But the view was less important that what I was starting to see in the future.
Next -- Easter
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