NOVEMBER 27, 2024 – We’d just sat down at the dinner table in the Connecticut home of our younger son’s family, when my phone rang. Caller I.D. showed “Allina Health.” I gulped. Our older son had undergone a heart MRI Monday and a PET scan on Tuesday. When scheduling these tests, the primary doctor had expressed particular concern over the latter. Two weeks ago, Cory had been admitted to the hospital for a battery of heart tests. One of them revealed nodules on the lung—triggering the need for further testing before lung cancer could be ruled out. Every day since, everyone who knows and loves Cory has been worried . . . sick. If he himself appeared calm on the outside on the outside, he told my wife, “I might seem that way, but I’m not calm on the inside.”
Under the cover of the dinner conversation, I slipped away from the table, out of the room and around a corner. If the call was about the MRI and PET scan and there was bad news, I wanted to shield everyone from my reaction.
“Eric Nilsson” I answered.
“I have good news,” the good doctor told me, after identifying himself. No words could have made me more grateful—on Thanksgiving Day or any other day of the year. As he explained that one of the two nodules previously detected by a CAT scan had disappeared entirely and that the PET scan had found no metabolic activity in the second nodule, I felt as though my head had turned into a helium balloon released to the upper reaches of the stratosphere. When the doctor added that the heart MRI did not show signs of systemic damage, I felt my feet leave the floor. My return to the dinner table was infinitely happier than it might have been, had the good doctor been the bearer of bad news.
When my call to Cory went straight to voicemail, I then immediately sent him a text: “CALL ME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!! I HAVE GREAT NEWS FROM THE DOCTOR!—on both the heart and lung fronts.” It’s one of the rare occasions on which I’ve deployed all-caps and exclamation marks in a text. Cory has never been effusive, and his reaction to positive news is always guarded, subdued. When he called an hour later, his response to this happy information was likewise cautious. “I want to hear it straight from the doctor,” he said.
Fair enough. I was aware too, that Cory is still not feeling well, is struggling with anemia and that his condition requires further examination and treatment. At least the more serious possibilities, however, have been eliminated. In no way did his understandable reservations diminish my relief or gratitude.
Ninety minutes later, Beth and I pulled into the yard of Lyme Light on Hamburg Cove on the opposite side of the Connecticut from our younger son’s home. No house or yard lights were on yet, and when the car lights went off, my gaze was drawn upward to the heavens. Bright stellar light made me gasp. I quickly unlocked the house for Beth and carried in our luggage (we’d flown to Hartford earlier in the day and driven straight to our son’s place on the other side of the Connecticut River from the Cove). I then returned to the yard to admire the rare gems shining from incalculable distances from our tiny planet.
I said a kind of silent prayer of thanks to the forces of the universe, just as I’ve told our nine-year-old granddaughter Illiana each night before bedtime to “say a prayer for your daddy, that the cosmic powers may restore him to health, hope and happiness.” For 17 years I’ve not been a religious person, and if I “believe in God,” my concept of the Creator as a construct beyond the laws of physics is something that has evolved far beyond what I’d been taught in Sunday school a million years ago. My suggestion of prayer to Illiana could be viewed as a form of self-subterfuge or less charitably and more precisely, perhaps, as a kind of self-deceit. If I’m an avowed non-believer, then why do I pretend to believe?
Except that question begs a more central one: Am I really just pretending?
I don’t know the answer, but on this day of Thanksgiving, what I do know with absolute certainty—and gratitude beyond measure—is that parental and grand-parental love transcends all religious dogma and dicta.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
