Journal of Sacred Work

"When was the last time he closed his doctor's bag, reassured a patient with a parting word, and drove the long way home?" -Kirsten Lokvam Chapman in her book, The Way Home (Third Tree Press.)

   For twenty-one years, my wife of forty-four years wrote a sweet column for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. Her columns described her clouds of memory: friends, family, recollections of two childhood homes. Twice, she was selected by the state's press association as "Best Columnist in Ohio."

   Her father was a physician – first a country doctor in Wisconsin and then a surgeon. The doctor's bag was a symbol of power back then. The appearance of one struck fear (those dreaded shots) or signaled, with its very presence, that healing, relief, and comfort, had arrived.

   In the days of house calls, the arrival of the doctor with his satchel of magic wrapped in pebbled leather told us help had arrived. In the midst of illness, particularly after I was struck with Scarlet Fever and, later, Crohn's disease, I remember feeling better just hearing the doctor's voice in the hallway.

   What recollections rain down from our clouds of memory? Of course, not all will sprinkle soft warmth.

   For the Death Row prisoner I see each week, the clouds sleet pain.  There was the year when, at age fifteen, he lived in a cardboard box outside the workplace that paid him $3.35 an hour. 

   But, it's the good memories that heal us to the point where we are homesick for the days we have now haloed and placed reverently on the altar of happiness.

   In his last months, my father often re-imagined the markers he laid along Ohio's Black River where, as a child, he had placed his Muskrat traps.

   In her last days, my mother-in-law repeatedly recalled the Depression that stole her family's farm.

   The former Chief Nursing Officer of the the first hospital I headed (more than thirty years ago) tells me her days are flooded with recollection. She recalls her hours in the operating room and the times she and I worked to solve nurse-doctor disputes.

   When we discover we have less time ahead we lean into our past. 

   After a stroke felled her father, my wife visited him in Kenosha. She brought his black bag into the kitchen.

   "I felt how the handles, brown with age, still carried the imprint of his grip," she wrote. "Before Dad opened it, his hands, in greeting, rubbed across and patted the leather. Then he unsnapped the lock, releasing the bag's familiar, medicinal scent… He slowly scrutinized an old prescription pad here, a stethoscope there. I wondered what middle-of-the-night births or sickrooms or accidents rushed forward in his crowded memories." 

   The next day she said goodbye, then hesitated. "Seeing him at the table, so patient in life's hand…made me go back inside…he looked surprised, as if to say, What's this?' "

   She told her father she needed one more hug. It was the last time she saw him. 

-Reverend Erie Chapman 

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