Code Blue

~ Code Blue

The third Code Blue had been the last

and they knew it when they saw us coming,

the doctor by my side in his scrubs,

the hallway like a tunnel

through the base of a mountain,

like a funhouse distortion

where we might have been walking

20 seconds or 20 light years,

might never reach them at all.

The doctor didn’t want to say the words

and didn’t have to.

We reached the father first,

his eyes seeking mine,

demanding the answer he didn’t want to hear,

words that will not echo in his memory

because I replied to his silent question

in kind, with my eyes, my heart.

He turned and fell to one knee,

the news ricocheting down the hall

from sister to uncle to the room reserved

for the worst kind of waiting.

The family poured into the hallway

with a cacophony of no’s,

sobbing, shrieking, collapsing into each other,

a calm cousin approaching me

through the chaos, asking hypnotically,

“Chaplain?

Is it true?”

She needed proof,

so I pictured it in my mind—the ICU room I’d just left,

the trauma team stepping away from the bed,

the patient suddenly so small, so still,

the monitors quiet.

She watched via satellite in the screens of my eyes

and then she knew.

I gave her my body to hold onto, and

holding her, holding her,

I saw the children over her shoulder,

perched on the ledges of the middle-of-the-night windows,

faces scanning for sanity, for sense.

I sat between them, turning to the five-year-old

no one had spoken to:

“His body got hurt.

It got so hurt

the doctors couldn’t fix it.”

Her face didn’t change

as she stored this data for later—

my white face going into a file, forever tagged

with bewilderment, with death.

My left hand on her back, I turned

to the tiny shoulder where my right hand rested—

the four-year-old defiantly comforting

the baby next to him in the arms of a crying aunt:

“He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s okay!”

His eyes dared me to contradict him.

I didn’t.

He knew something,

something True,

and it demanded to be considered.

He’s okay. We’re okay. It’s okay.

Someone would tell him otherwise

very soon, but it wouldn’t be me, for some reason.

For that moment, in the alien fluorescence
of a night he would never forget,

I honored this prophet and his declaration.
We held each other's gaze
amid the wailing and weaving,
his family grieving the relative,
the boy seizing the absolute,
me suspended between the two,
the Mystery holding us both
in a place beyond knowing and not knowing
until Security asked if I was ready
to begin escorting the family
two by two to see the body
for themselves.