Category: resurrection

Emerging Transformed

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The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one 
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something undone.

Today’s edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You’re not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it’s been.
~Rae Armantrout from “Unbidden” in Versed

I wish for you the blessing
of a room where strangers sit
breathing unashamed
into a chosen silence

Not the gasping breath
of travelers on a crowded plane
or the tenuous wheeze
of the waiting room

May you know the power
of those who have decided
to submit to the silence
to enter the mystery
be consumed by it
and emerge transformed

May you belong among those
who inhale the stillness
as if it is keeping us
because it is
keeping us alive
~Bethany Lee, “To Enter the Mystery” from Etude for Belonging: poems for practicing courage and hope

The grace of God means something like:
Here is your life.
You might never have been, but you are…
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
I am with you.
~Frederick Buechner in “Wishful Thinking and later” in Beyond Words

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not in despair;
persecuted, but not abandoned;
struck down, but not destroyed…

Therefore we do not lose heart.
Though outwardly we are wasting away,
yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
For our light and momentary troubles
are achieving for us an eternal glory
that far outweighs them all.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen,
but on what is unseen.
For what is seen is temporary,
but what is unseen is eternal.
-2 Cor 4:8-9, 16-18

I believe like a child
that suffering will be healed and made up for,
that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions
will vanish like a pitiful mirage
…that in the world’s finale,
at the moment of eternal harmony,
something so precious will come to pass
that it will suffice for all hearts,
for the comforting of all resentments,
for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity,
for all the blood that they’ve shed;
that it will make it not only possible to forgive
but to justify all that has happened.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky from The Brothers Karamazov

Twenty-five years ago,
a day started with bright sun above
and ended in tears and bloodshed below.

This is a day for recollection;
we live out a remembrance of
the torrential red that flowed that day;

A quarter century later,
our streets both near and far-away
still course with the blood of innocents,
so what have we learned from all this?

That terrible day’s edges were so sharp
we all bled;
still bearing the scars,
we need comforting.

So do not be afraid:
you are not alone.

We breathe and weep and love
as we remember that day,
emerging inevitably transformed.

Come and See: So the House was Filled…

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Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 

So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.

The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. 

Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.
John 12: 1-11

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”

I am a man who has hoped, in time,
that his life, when poured out at the end,
would say ‘good-good-good-good-good!’
like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit.

I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs.
I am an old man full of love.
I am a man of faith.

But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place.
Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat,
in the fog, in the dark.

Even a man of faith knows that …
we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.
~Wendell Berry from Jayber Crow

 She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial.
Mark 14:8

Last week, it became apparent one warm late summer evening that in the thick bushes lining the front of our farmhouse under our windows, some animal had died.

The stink wafted on the breeze into our bedrooms through our summer-open windows.

The outdoor farm cats and our dog were accounted for, so it must have been a dead squirrel, a raccoon or even a (actually dead) possum, all occasional nighttime visitors to our cat food dish on the nearby front porch.

Trying to find the offending carcass would involve cutting through dense foliage that had been growing over two decades – not an easy task to undertake. So we closed the windows and hoped the smell would dissipate quickly.

Surprisingly, a day later it was mostly gone, much to our relief. It is possible another animal scavenger decided it was worth hauling away. We were most grateful the smell of death was no longer filling our house…

Just the week before this scripture section from the book of John, Martha warned Jesus that opening Lazarus’ tomb would release the inevitable stench of death. Yet when Lazarus was raised, the odor of death was overcome by renewal and restoration.

When Martha’s sister Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with an expensive fragrant oil, normally used in preparation for burial, it fills the entire house with its perfume. Jesus sees it as a harbinger for what is to come in the next week.

His faith in God’s plan means Jesus goes through enough to kill Him.

In this broken world, we live in the smudge and stench of mortal man’s smell of death, yet we are saved by this crushed, dying Savior who pours out a perfume of Himself for us.

Like Mary, let us also do what we can:
filling God’s house with His fragrance.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Going First Through the Dark Doorway

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In gratitude to the writing and wisdom of farmer Wendell Berry who, at age 92, passed through his porch’s dark doorway yesterday 8/31/26

All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
out of the trailer truck into the chute.
From time to time he’s clambered down to even
the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.

I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff
he says, while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn

no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses
burst through when snow avalanches off the roof.
Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his,
horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces.

…he says
let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, a couple of aging fools.

I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot
less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.
~Maxine Kumin from “Chores”

photo by Emily Vander Haak

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
~Wendell Berry “They Sit Together on the Porch”

If just for a moment,
when this world is tilting so far
we just might fall off,
we pause to look at where we’ve been
and get our feet back under us.

The porch is a good place to start:
a bridge to what is beyond
without leaving the familiar.

Outside, looking square at the unknown,
yet still hearing and smelling and tasting
the affection that dwells just inside these walls.

What could we want more
than to be missed when we step away?

Our voice, our words, our heart, our touch
never to be replaced,
its absence a hole impossible to fill…

When we are called back inside
where Love made us who we are,
may the “in between” of
time spent on the porch,
be even more treasured,
because two aging fools sat together there a spell.

front porch

Come and See: Unbind Him and Let Him Go

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Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. 

Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” 

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” 

Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone.

And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” 

When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” 

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth.

Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
John 11:38-44

The man was wholly raised, but not wholly freed.
See, here is a living man in the garments of death!
That napkin and other grave-clothes were
altogether congruous with death,
but they were much out of place
when Lazarus began again to live.
It is a wretched sight to see a living man wearing his shroud.

If the Lord Jesus Christ employed the disciples
in relieving Lazarus of his grave-clothes,
do you not think he would employ us
if we were ready for such work? 
Innumerable are the instances of souls
blessed by human instrumentality…
~Charles Spurgeon from “Unbinding Lazarus”

When the Lord speaks,
it will usually produce something that needs to be unwrapped.
God’s words are powerful. They create, heal, and restore.
They change things in both the visible and invisible realms.

…as we become committed to the discipline of unwrapping,
like the bystanders Jesus invited into Lazarus’ miracle story,
we’ll be better positioned to participate
in the wondrous things Jesus is always doing in the lives of others
and the world around us.
~Randy Boldt from “The Discipline of Unwrapping”

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
~Gilbert Chesterton “The Convert”

Love, take my hand and lead me like the blind,
Unbandage me, unwrap me from my fear,
Open my eyes, my heart, my soul, my mind.
I struggle with these grave clothes, this dark earth,
But you are calling ‘Lazarus come forth!’
~Malcolm Guite from “He who has ears to hear let him hear’

The witnesses were marveling over the miracle of a living, breathing Lazarus, four days dead, stumbling out of the tomb, still wrapped in his graveclothes, in response to Jesus’ shout “Lazarus, come out.” 

The next command, spoken to those standing there with their mouths agape, was just as consequential: “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Jesus’ message was clear. This miracle doesn’t end with a stilled heart beating again. It is an ongoing resurrected transformation for the witnesses as well.

What the Lord raises up, the community must unwrap, helping Lazarus move back into life, with support.

We are surrounded every day by those who, like Lazarus, are metaphorically walking in their graveclothes, spiritually dead or dying. They may be a family member or neighbor, they may be living unhoused in the woods down the road, they may be lying overdosed in a city alley. When called back to life, their next step can’t happen until they are unbound from the death-wraps that smother and blind them.

The rest is up to us, their community.
Jesus, with only His words, gives new life to the dead.
Jesus, with only His words, commands us to make it possible for the living to thrive, unshackled from paralyzing sin, and freed to new life.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Come and See: He Wept…

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Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. 

So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” 

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” 

They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”
John 11:17-37

Beauty, to the Japanese of old, held together the ephemeral with the sacred. Cherry blossoms are most beautiful as they fall, and that experience of appreciation lead the Japanese to consider their mortality. Hakanai bi (ephemeral beauty) denotes sadness, and yet in the awareness of the pathos of life, the Japanese found profound beauty.

For the Japanese, the sense of beauty is deeply tragic, tied to the inevitability of death.

Jesus’ tears were also ephemeral and beautiful. His tears remain with us as an enduring reminder of the Savior who weeps. Rather than to despair, though, Jesus’ tears lead the way to the greatest hope of the resurrection. Rather than suicide, Jesus’ tears lead to abundant life.
~Makoto Fujimura

SoliloquiesCharis
Charis-Kairos (The Tears of Christ) by Makoto Fujimura

When I read that Jesus weeps as He witnesses the tears of grief of His dear friends, I am comforted. 

He understands and feels what we feel,
His tears just as plentiful and salty,
His feelings of love brimming so fully
they must be let go and cannot be held back.
He too is overwhelmed by the pathos
of His vulnerable and visceral humanity.

Our Jesus who wept with us becomes a promise of ultimate joy.

There is beauty in His rain of ephemeral tears.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Come and See: Greater Than All

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“For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

There was again a division among the Jews because of these words. Many of them said, “He has a demon, and is insane; why listen to him?”  Others said, “These are not the words of one who is oppressed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?”

At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.”

 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands.

He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. And many came to him. And they said, “John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.” And many believed in him there.
John 10: 17-42

Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
~Luci Shaw from “Mary’s Song” from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

When, in the cavern darkness, Jesus
opened his small, bleating mouth (even before
his eyes widened to the supple world his
lungs had sighed into being), did he intuit
how hungrily the lungs gasp? Did he begin, then,
to love the way air sighs as it brushes in and out
through the portals of tissue to sustain
the tiny heart’s iambic beating? And how,
fueled by air, the dazzling blood tramps
the crossroads of the brain like donkey tracks,
corpuscles skittering to the earlobes and toenails?

Bottle of the breath of God, speaking in stories,
shouting across wild, obedient water, his voice
was stoppered only by inquisition, unfaith
and anguish. Did he know that he would,
in the end, leak all his blood, heave a final
groan and throw his breath,
oxygen for the world, back to its Source
before the next dark cave?
~Luci Shaw “Breath” from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

Greater than all –
Creator of breath and sky and dust –
yet came to us as helpless baby.

He who is the air we need –
resides in our cells, our blood, our lungs, our heart.

He who lays down His life for us –
then picks it up again –
we are made in His image.

Listen for Him –
watch Him change the sky –
know He fills us wholly
with His Words and Breath.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Daylight Stakes Its Claim

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I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.
~Robert Creeley “The Flower”

…forests giving way
to open meadow where deep snow
lingers and finally relents, uncovering
acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche
white — daylight restaking its earthly claim.
Every season swallows someone — 
~Kevin Craft from “For the Climbers”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
~William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

In early July, up in the alpine meadows of the Cascade mountains grow delicate avalanche lilies pushing through icy crust as the snow melt completes. Though brief in their blooming, they are harbingers of long summer daylight, a reminder the painful darkness of winter is behind us, as well as bound to come again too soon.

I am swallowed by each season.

The lilies, bursting through waning snow, become a bit of heaven on earth. Despite the bleak chill of winter, they fight to rise triumphant each year, an eternal promise of a some-day never-ending summer.

A Stone Where the Crust of Time is Thin

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I went by the Druid stone 
   That stands in the garden white and lone,   
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   
   That at some moments there are thrown
   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   
   And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   
   Threw there when she was gardening.

      I thought her behind my back,
   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: “I am sure you are standing behind me,   
   Though how do you get into this old track?”
   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   
   As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
   That there was nothing in my belief.

      Yet I wanted to look and see
   That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision   
   A shape which, somehow, there may be.”
   So I went on softly from the glade,
   And left her behind me throwing her shade,   
As she were indeed an apparition—
   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
~Thomas Hardy “The Shadow on the Stone”

Scarce images of life,
one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways;
like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones,
upon a forlorn moor…
~John Keats from “Hyperion”

As living stones around a font today,
Rejoice with those who roll the stone away.
~Malcolm Guite from “Baptism”

hole

When Dan discovered this mighty boulder completely underground, near our family’s swing set, he decided it was to be unearthed to create our own standing stone garden close by.

Pulling out the stone took much digging and a strong tractor-pulled chain around its girth, but now here it sits, a Whatcom County sitting stone, where the crust of time is thin…

Big Rock Garden, Bellingham, WA
This dolmen is above the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland
Legananny Dolmen, Northern Ireland

Just as a signpost warns of rockfalls near a cliff-edge,
the standing stones were meant to mark a spot of danger.
A spot where … what?
Where the crust of time was thin?
Where a gate of some sort stood ajar?
~Diana Gabaldon from Outlander

Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria, UK

Come and See: Hidden in Plain Sight

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Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said,
“Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? 
And here he is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to him!
Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ? But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.” 

So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, 
“You know me, and you know where I come from.
But I have not come of my own accord. 
He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. 
I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.”  

So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come. Yet many of the people believed in him. They said, “When the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?”

The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him. 
Jesus then said, “I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will seek me and you will not find me. Where I am you cannot come.”  

The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? 

What does he mean by saying, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me,’ and, ‘Where I am you cannot come’?”
John 7:25-36

Where is my God ? what hidden place
Conceals Thee still?
What covert dare eclipse Thy face?
Is it Thy will?

O let not that of anything;
Let rather brass,
Or steel, or mountains be Thy ring,
And I will pass.

Thy will such a strange distance is,
As that to it
East and West touch, the poles do kiss,
And parallels meet.
~George Herbert from “The Search”

I try to find you, yet you are not here.
I’ve studied absence, fought to fill it in –
courage comes easier with a grasp of why.

A secret’s camouflaged when unconcealed.
I chose to not see/saw the thing too near?
Absence turns thicker, muscled by its strain.

A moon in daylight, whitest blue on blue,
surprises briefly, to appear surreal
until it slips to rights…

… plain sight goes blind through chasing clarity.
I looked for you, so couldn’t see you gone.

I sensed your not-there in its burning life.
I listened out to feel its silence beat.
It does not speak with any human mouth.
~Denise Riley from “Hiding in Plain Sight” from Say Something Back 

Jesus arrived in Jerusalem in plain sight to the people there,
but they did not trust what they saw Him do
nor trust His Words, unable to fathom
He could be the long-awaited Christ.

Their partial understanding
of who they believe the Christ would be
blinds them to the Christ who is right before their eyes.

Later on, the resurrected Jesus –
appearing as a gardener,
a stranger on the road to Emmaus,
a figure cooking fish over a charcoal fire on the beach –
is the Christ hidden in plain sight.

Jesus’ presence among us –
a paradox from beginning to end.
Our limited vision and knowledge challenge us
to accept His divinity when we see only the man.
Yet He is so much more…

The veil pulls back to show us who He is.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

The Lines Went Flat…

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First of all, we’ve been using the wrong word all these years. It means without rhythm. The only arrhythmia is asystole, I tell my students. That’s the flat line accompanied by the clang of alarms in all the television dramas. There’s not much you can do about it; the patient is dead and usually stays dead. The correct word to describe all the ways a heart can dance and die is dysrhythmia, which means a disordered rhythm. There’s the soldiered march of ventricular tachycardia or the pirouette twirl of Torsades. Ventricular fibrillation simply quivers on the monitor. When these rhythms occur, the patient is pulseless and sometimes you give magnesium, usually shock, and always pump their chest to the beat of whatever song lives in your head. Once I was speaking with a man who stopped in the middle of a word, and I watched the rhythm on the monitor change. When I didn’t feel a pulse, I started CPR, and then we placed the paddles on his chest and shouted, Clear, just like in the movies. And it worked. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, I don’t feel good. And I said, It’s okay, I’m going to get you better and smoothed the fair from his forehead, but then the alarms blared and the V tach returned, and we did it all over again—the drugs and compressions and shocks, and his eyes opened one more time and he mouthed I’m scared around the tube I’d placed in his throat, and I said, I’m here with you. But that was the last time he said anything. We didn’t stop for thirty minutes or more. He’d waved to his family when the medics loaded him into the ambulance with just a little chest pain, so they were shocked when I entered the small consult room to tell them he had died. His teenage son collapsed and landed on his knees and punched the ground and said, But we were fighting, and I think the last thing I said was I hate you.

All I’m trying to say is that it’s really important to use the right words.
~Rachel Mallalieu “A Brief History of Arrhythmia” from the journal PEMBROKE MAGAZINE

If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets for ever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers,
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
~Michael Ondaatje from “To a Sad Daughter”

I was still a kid
interning at State
he reminisces late in the meal—
It was a young red-headed woman
looked like my sister
when the lines went flat
I fell apart
shook
like a car with a broken axle
Went to the head surgeon
a fatherly man
Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard
before you know this business
and you just did row one, plot one.
~Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Surgeon” from The Book of Seventy

Like many other medical professionals who have worked in the trenches of frontline healthcare, I too am fascinated by the emergency room streaming drama “The Pitt.”

At first, I couldn’t watch without feeling I too should be working at the bedside alongside the ER team, trying my best to do the task assigned to me, responding to each new instruction, grateful when things go as hoped, crushed when nothing helps and the patient is lost.

The Pitt is the newest addition to the canon of medical dramas and feels like the real thing. All the technology is there, the medical terminology and procedures are real, in addition to the fraught interaction of professionals under stress. Most of all, it feels real because it shows patients and their families trying to cope with the worst day of their lives.

And medical miracles do happen, on TV and in real life.

Recently, a church friend was rescued in a drowning event, was unconscious on a ventilator for nearly a week, with much uncertainty about how much damage his brain had endured while under water. Several weeks later, he is now home, dealing with some memory gaps and muscle weakness, but improving strength daily.

Last week, I had the privilege of meeting a middle-aged pastor who was saved a few weeks ago when his heart stopped in his sleep. His wife started CPR, paramedics shocked his heart in the field more than once, he was stabilized in the ER, unconscious on a ventilator, cooled down to a lower body temperature to preserve his brain function.

His care team, along with family and friends, watched and waited and prayed, uncertain what would be the rest of his story.

When he was warmed up 24 hours later, he woke up, able to breathe on his own. Other than no memory for those brief hours of unconsciousness, he is still himself – living with a new awareness of his vulnerability and an immense gratitude, now with an implanted defibrillator in his chest.

The right words after being brought back from the dead?
The right words when we never know if they will be the last words we utter or the last we will ever hear?

I know what they would be for me. I carry them in my heart…