Miracle. All of it.

~ Live & Learn

Once a week I take off all my jewelry, slip into a shapeless blue polyester volunteer coat, clip ID tags to my lapel, and drive 5.3 miles through Piedmont and down 52nd Street to our local children’s hospital. I park, take the elevator to the third floor, and buzz myself into the NICU. Standing at a wall of metal sinks, I scrub up to my elbows for a full minute, enjoying the smell of the soap and the sound the brush makes against my fingernails. I dry off, gown up, and walk the nurseries, listening for babies in distress…

The lights are dim. The nurses whisper. The monitors chirp and ping. The babies rest. My long big-lung breaths stretch underneath three of theirs..Last week a baby boy with a swollen head and a shunt near his temple found my eyes and locked in. We stared at each other, blinking back and forth, each blink longer than the last, until he could hold his lids open no longer and the rows of his dark glossy eyelashes came together like a Venus flytrap. Bette, who had been watching from across the room, nodded at me and winked. He’d rest on my chest for the next hour, my heartbeat, my warmth and humanity an incalculable improvement on his indifferent crib. The skin hungers for touch, from cradle to grave. “Close silence—that’s all they need,” she whispered to me.

~ Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say (January 9, 2018)

Notes:

  • Photo – My Irrelephant Life.
  • Related Posts: Kelly Corrigan; Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
  • Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

30 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  3. Hi David, this is exactly how I’ve begun to feel about my volunteer visits to a close-by nursing home (not the one where Anthony was). I mostly visit people with dementia and the quote fits uncannily. Thank you.

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      1. Oh Kiki, I am so sorry. ‘WMS’ is short for ‘What Mimi Said’ — she is a dear friend and often makes just the remark that I was going to make, so I often am left to say WMS, or stated another way…ditto! 😀

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  12. Saw a vid with an elderly man doing something like that – he goes every day to a hospital and holds babies who get no visits, who are there for a long or short time, just holds them, talks to them, lets them fall asleep…. restores our faith in human beings! This is beautiful

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  13. My first-born spent his first two months in the NICU and his last 3 weeks in a room at the Montreal Children’s, and ever since then, I have promised myself that I shall volunteer upon my retirement to go and hold babies. The ladies (there were only ladies in my time almost 22 years ago) used to get mad at me, so to speak, because they never got to hold Austin all that much as I was always there 😉

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  15. Pingback: So heartwarming to know there are people like this. | Chilismom

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