Now that I’m older, people often ask me when I’m going to retire. I tell them, “When I stop loving it, I’ll stop doing it.” But there’s a deeper motivation: it’s in the ER that I most often meet ‘my betters.” People who have lived through shapings of fearful and demanding intensity, and become individuals – often unsung – of remarkable dimension and scope. Not uncommonly, the ‘shaping’ reveals or develops a core of courage, or honor, or perseverance. But it is of two courageous individuals I wish to speak.
He was a big African-American who came to our ER with pneumonia. We got that squared away, and I had a moment of free time. I’d noticed a tattoo on his forearm: US Army.
“Being 80 years-old, you must have served in World War 2. He looked at me and nodded.
“He was in Europe,” he wife volunteered. “Gunnery Sergeant in the Quartermaster’s Corps,” added another of the gathered family.
“So you must have been a member of the Red Ball Express,” I said.
His gaze snapped towards me. “How’d you know that?” he rumbled.
“What is that… that Red Ball thing?” several of the family asked together, looking at each other.
I looked at him, “You never told them about being a hero?”
“Wasn’t no hero. Just doin’ my job.”
But the family persisted and I explained that in the European Theater, World War 2, African Americans drove to Hell and back each day to supply the troops; bombs, firefight, snipers and the like notwithstanding. The legendary Red Ball Express.
It turns out that ‘Gunny’ had been caught in the siege of Bastogne by German troops for several weeks. He gave a brief outline to a story none of his family had ever heard. “For four weeks, I never heard so much shootin’, so many explosions, seen so much dyin’ and heard so much prayin’ – even from atheists. One of them atheists told God not to send Jesus there, for it warn’t no place for a boy.” Gunny looked down at his hands, down over long, untended, unremembered years. “Yeah, my group – and plenty of others – got surrounded in Bastogne… Battle of the Bulge,” he whispered from far away. Coming back abruptly to the present, he added, “Till Ol’ Georgie Patton swung ‘round a couple regiments and freed us up. Week later, I was back pushin’ supplies.”
I shook his hand and thanked him what he had done. I told him the guys of the Red Ball were incredible. He simply said, “We had to be incredible.”
And then there was Tessa…
I met her only once and then too briefly; too briefly to learn from her how to prepare to die with grace. I read the obituaries and fully realize one day I shall be among the featured. How will I go? I can only hope to do half as well as she.
Forty-four year-old Tessa was dying the hard way: slowly and inevitably. Her death from wide-spread cancer would come soon, and unlike Gunny’s case, no amount of courage, resolve, or good fortune would save her; no reprieves would be granted, no regiments to lift the seige. Death held her gaze and moved slowly towards her. But before her end, Tessa must suffer. The cancer caused periodic build-ups of fluid in her right lung. As I walked into her Bay, meeting her for the first and only time, she quipped, “I’ll give you a nickel to stick a needle in my lung.” Thoracentesis; introduce a needle, draw off fluid; the lung can now expand, Tessa can breath again… for now. Death grinned; Tessa joked. Such humor can only spring from a bulwark of inward, hard-anchored courage. If there is a grim protocol for dying, Tessa ignored it as she gently tossed humor in the air. Tessa, dying, taught us how to live.
I know nothing of the metrics of courage. If I am ever called upon to exhibit bravery on such a scale I have no idea how I shall perform. It is one thing to sit in the stands analyzing that event; quite another to face the on-coming bull.
In Tessa’s case it must be said that the conflict we cannot win says all of us that truly matters. I wonder when death comes for me if, like Tessa, I can laugh, and, like Tessa, take from Death the final word. What I say of her is this: God must have had some very important work for her on the Other Side, since he crafted her so specially on this one.
