Bargaining With God in a Hospital Chapel
I offered everything I had to a room that answered in silence.
At 3 a.m. I wrote a list of everything I was willing to give up on the back of a parking garage receipt, and I read it out loud to an empty room on the second floor of St. Vincent's, and I meant every word more than I have ever meant anything.
My daughter was in surgery. Ruptured appendix, which sounds almost quaint, a word from old novels, until a surgeon with tired eyes uses the word peritonitis and then the word spread and then says, "We're taking her back right now," and the doors swallow your seven-year-old and you are standing in a hallway holding her sneakers. They give you the sneakers. Nobody warns you about that part. Small purple sneakers with the laces still double-knotted, because I had double-knotted them myself that morning, in another lifetime, when my biggest fear was being late.
The waiting room had a television bolted near the ceiling playing muted infomercials, and a man asleep under his coat, and I could not stay in it. I walked. Hospitals at night are built for exactly this kind of walking. And on the second floor, between radiology and a locked gift shop, there was a door with a small brass sign: Chapel. All Are Welcome.
I had not prayed in nineteen years. I went in the way you grab a fire extinguisher... no theology, all emergency.
It was a beige room the size of a garage. Six short pews. A fake stained glass panel at the front, lit from behind by a bulb you could hear faintly buzzing. There were no real candles, fire code I suppose, just a bank of electric ones where you pressed a button and a plastic flame flickered on. Someone had left three lit. Three other people that day had stood where I was standing. I found that unbearable and comforting in equal measure.
I sat in the second pew and I started to deal.
I am telling you this because everyone does it and nobody admits it. We talk about prayer like it is poetry, but at 3 a.m. it is commerce. I offered the cigarettes first, which was easy, I had quit twice before. Then I offered the drinking, which was harder and truer, and my voice did a thing when I said it that let me know I had located a real chip, something the house might actually accept. Then the money I would give, the volunteering I would do, the church I would attend, denomination negotiable. I wrote them on the parking receipt because I did not trust the version of me that would exist after the fear passed, and I signed it. I actually signed it, like a contract, with the golf pencil from beside the guest book.
And then I ran out of offers and said the true thing, the one under all of it.
"Take it from my years and put it on hers."
The oldest deal there is. Every parent in every century, every language, the same clause.
The room said nothing.
The bulb buzzed. The plastic flames did their loop. Somewhere above me a cart with a squeaking wheel went down a long hall, and that was the entire response of heaven, as far as I could measure it.
You do not find out what you believe in a hospital chapel. You find out what you are willing to trade, and who you have been refusing to become while the becoming was still cheap.
Here is where I am supposed to tell you whether it worked, and here is where I have to be honest and say I have no idea. The surgeon found me at 5:40 in the morning. She had the mask pulled down around her neck and she said... "She did great," and those three words entered me like current. My knees actually went, just slightly, the way they say knees do. My daughter came home nine days later, milking her convalescence for an outrageous amount of ice cream, and she is eleven now, and loud, and alive, and last month she broke her wrist skateboarding and was proud of it.
The antibiotics worked. The surgeon's hands worked. That is the accounting a reasonable man writes down. But I have the receipt. I still have it, in the drawer of my desk, in a sandwich bag like evidence, and the reason I kept it is not gratitude. It is that the list turned out to be a document about something else entirely.
Because the fear passed, and the promises came due, and I learned exactly what my signature was worth.
The cigarettes, I kept. Four years now. The drinking took two tries and one bad relapse and a Tuesday night meeting in a church basement, where, irony noted, I ended up attending church after all, just the basement instead of the sanctuary, folding chairs instead of pews, burnt coffee instead of wine. Item three on the receipt I never told anyone about, because it was not really an offer to God. It said, in handwriting I barely recognize: "Call Tomas."
Tomas is my brother.
We had not spoken in six years, over money, originally, and then over all the things the money was standing in for. And in that chapel, dredging myself for anything else of value to put on the table, what came up out of the dark was his name. That told me something I did not want to know: that somewhere in me, the ledger of what I owed the universe had my brother's name in it, in my own handwriting.
I did not call him for eight months... I want that on the record, how slowly I paid. A man will quit drinking before he will apologize. But the receipt sat in the drawer and it knew what it said, and one Sunday in November I dialed, and he answered on the second ring... and said, "Took you long enough," and then neither of us could talk right for a minute. Forgiveness, it turns out, is mostly logistics. You just have to place the call. He met my daughter that Christmas. She calls him Uncle T and considers him her personal property.
So what do I believe now? I believe the chapel was a room where, for one hour, I could not lie. That is more than I can say for most rooms. Whether the silence I bargained with was God, or was just me finally alone with the truth of what my family was worth to me, I honestly cannot tell you, and I have stopped needing to. I wrote my way toward an answer for a few years, poems full of buzzing bulbs and plastic candles, and the closest I ever got was this: hope is the only currency that room accepts, and everyone who walks in is already carrying some, or they would not have found the door.
I went back once, two years later, when my daughter had a follow-up scan. Everything was fine. I was not there to deal. I sat in the second pew for a few minutes, and on my way out I pressed the button on one of the electric candles and watched the plastic flame flicker on.
It was not for anyone in particular... It was for whoever came in at 3 a.m. next, so they would see it burning and know somebody had stood there before them, made their ridiculous offer, signed their receipt, and walked out into a morning that came anyway.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.