parents/children

One morning this week we finished rounds and sat about doing sharing circle. Typically our conversation revolves around typical water cooler talk, for example what happened in Vampire Diaries or one of the seven most current reality TV shows, how bad the traffic and/or weather was during the drive this morning, or how wedding plans are going because wow Becky just got her invitations finished and they look fantastic.

It just so happened that there was an excess of estrogen that day and everyone was in the mood for a particularly teary type of morning, so all of the physios talked about some of their previous patients with incredible stories. In my other blog, I talked about a patient I had who was just the sweetest man and always said thank you very much! whenever I did something. I remember talking to my CI who told me to go do a chart read on him, because somewhere in there it says how he had both of his legs broken by the Nazis, and just barely scraped by and made it here.

So this leads me to the story of one of my colleague's patients she had a few years ago. I actually don't know the patient's name, so we will call him Jack. What I do know is that Jack lived in Germany as a kid, growing up as a tot before Germany converted to Reich-ism. Then Hitler came to power and his life was not the same. Instead of playing with toy cars and tricycles and whatever action figures are appropriate for little children, Jack spent his time carrying ammunition for Nazis to use to kill people. His father was blond hair blue eyed and his mother was Jewish. When he was young his dad sent his mother to a concentration camp and he never saw her again.

Jack ran away from home sometime after that, and nobody blames him. He never talks about his father other than to spit bile and hatred, and nobody blames him. Jack came to Canada, the land of opportunity, and forged a life and met his wife and just tried to live normally.

I don't know what age he was when my colleague saw him in hospital, but I can only assume it was late in life because he was old and his wife was dying. They came together, he was on ortho and she was on medicine. My colleague remembered back to a specific day (and this is where the tissue comes out and she begins rubbing her red-rimmed eyes) when she went to look for Jack for his PM joint class, and she went to his room but couldn't find him there. She went downstairs to medicine figuring he'd be in his wife's room and he was, and she stood there in the doorway and watched them for a second, assessing whether it was rude to interrupt because as cruel as we are as physiotherapists, we are still people and can still be polite. She watched as he held the hand of his dying wife, tears flowing through the wrinkles and crow's feet on his face, and thanked her from the bottom of his heart for being with him and loving him and for giving him the most wonderful life.

Who knew that an inversion of love could exist so? The parent, who is supposed to be the golden role model, burning his wife while the son, who was supposed to follow in his father's footsteps, instead burned with a love for his wife. How dare we complain about our day - our mundane and banal distresses - when we do not understand hardship?

I learned a lesson last week and it is not new but it bears repeating. Be thankful from the bottom of your heart for everything that is beautiful in life.