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A Little White Feather
Cate M. Cummings
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Cate M. Cummings is President of Cate Cummings Publicity & Promotion Group, specializing in alternative health and healing, metaphysical, new age, spiritual, and visionary books. You may contact her at
www.bookpublicity.com |
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It is October. I stare down at my father's driver's license. I hold it and try to visualize, on this small, precise government issue card, the dimension of a man's life. I am trying to keep in mind, as I sit in the hospital waiting room with my husband consoling me, that the man who is my father, lying in an ICU unit close by, with five bodily systems shut down, deserves more consideration and deliberation than the doctors are giving him. Apparently it is my burden because I will not pronounce my father done.
How in the world, though, to make these decisions? The doctors want permission to remove the breathing tube from the tracheotomy, the feeding tube from his stomach, the dialysis equipment persuading his kidneys to continue functioning...and on...and on. The hospital staff, having given up on my father and pronounced him "ready to pass on," "no way out," is goading me to free up hospital space for someone who has a chance, a real chance of being "fixed."
It is November. Sometimes, when I walk the halls of the hospital building , I feel as if I am in a surreal moment, dreamlike if you will, nightmarish if you’d rather. All the floors of the building are exactly alike – distinguished only by the elevator buttons I push in a daze of despair. This morning, once again, my husband and I walk along the never-ending corridor in shadowed light toward the ICU double doors which do not welcome us but serve as barriers. As we reach the doors, I become aware of something on the floor in front of us.
There we are--in the hospital corridor in front of the double doors, both bending to pick up the little white feather we see laying on the floor. A little white feather! A feather in a sterile hospital environment!? “I think it’s for you,” my husband impulsively says.
Puzzled, holding the feather in my hand, I begin to move through the doors. As I look up again, I am astonished as I realize we are not on the fourth floor ICU unit, but on the second floor. Together, we hold the little white feather as we read in huge letters before us--"DELIVERY". It is the place where babies are born, where hope is born, where new life – new life! – becomes a reality.
In the midst of chiding relatives urging me to give up on my father, my father's own living trust stating "do not use extraordinary measures to keep me alive in the event of a medical catastrophe," the medical staff's inexplicable lack of faith in any type of recovery at all-- I still insisted immutably on not deciding to take a life. To persist. To endure. To persevere. To choose life. Not the cliché “life,” but life as a never-to-be-seen again version of, an extraordinary expression of, that benefactor we cannot really name.
The gift of mind is an immense blessing bestowed upon us; and, sometimes with a hint to create a stir in our mind's moment, we wake up and come to understand that we are being soothed in the warmed gloved hand of God as if we might protect a small fragile bird in our own hands.
It is December. In a few more days it will be Christmas. My father is here in my home visiting with me. "DELIVERY!"
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