I write this less than 24 hours after it happened. Compelled to, in the knowing of how quickly the moment can pass, and wanting it not to.
It was Thursday. My wife was still recovering from a serious episode of vertigo the previous week and was taking it easy; consistent balance is still not a certainty, so normal walking takes more of a conscious effort than usual. On this day, the sun broke through the late spring gray enough to consider the first ice cream treat of the year. “Let’s take a drive and enjoy the sun.”
Thinking we might have to drive farther, to our delight we found that our favorite neighborhood ice cream shop had opened for the season, so our “drive” took us only a few blocks from home. Our neighborhood of Bloomfield (“Pittsburgh’s Little Italy”) is now an amalgam of many strands of residents, similar to many other urban neighborhoods. Pittsburgh, in fact, is often referred to as a “city of neighborhoods” along with its other moniker, “The City of Bridges.” Once almost exclusively an enclave of Italian immigrants, the neighborhood has evolved into a mix of young and old, professional and other working classes, dominated by the presence of two large hospitals, but so far has resisted the total gentrification of other areas of the city. We have owned and lived in the same house for more than 40 years, which provides a sense of stability when most other “senses” are continually upended.
The neighborhood was dramatically reshaped in 2008 with the completion of the new UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The hospital sits on the site of the former St. Francis Medical Center, a Catholic hospital owned and run for more than 150 years by the Sisters of St. Francis of Millvale. One of that hospital’s many legacies is that it was one of the first hospitals in the country to treat alcoholism from a medical perspective, offering free medical and loving spiritual care to indigent patients suffering from the ravages of their condition. Before its demolition to make way for the new hospital, it also opened one of the first programs in the tri-state area to treat adolescent addiction, a remarkably unacknowledged problem in the early 1980s, and it is also where I met my wife after we both were recruited to staff the new unit; she a nurse and me a social worker. Children’s now provides world-class general and specialty medical care to children, adolescents, and young adults.
The hospital created a daily beehive of neighborhood activity, its massive and expanding infrastructure accommodating patients and families from around the world, including the not infrequent Amish families who travel from their communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states to access the care provided there.
The street map around the neighborhood is a patchwork of one-way streets ending in other one-way streets going the other direction, confusing even residents and the best GPS tools. One has to be a true local to have the slightest hope of getting to one’s destination without numerous missteps and U-turns. Currently, major street construction has added to this usual mix of puzzle pieces, such that already narrow streets are further narrowed and “Street Closed” signs await at seemingly every turn.
And so we parked along the sidewalk, finding a space in front of the shop. We enjoyed the shaded spot away from the sun’s heat and sat in the car, savoring the moment and watching our dog Lucy enjoy her ice cream treat along with ours. It was in many ways a quiet and calm moment we have come to be grateful for in retirement. A day like any other day. Except it wasn’t, when the moment quickly took another turn.
The quiet was quickly shattered by a loud “bang” that startled both of us, not immediately recognizing its source, as it seemed at first to surround us. The sound of metal on metal is not unlike the “crack” of a gunshot, with which we are unfortunately familiar after decades of city life. Traffic up and down the street, made more narrow by construction, was tighter than usual; cars often crept past one another slowly, as to avoid clipping extended rear-view mirrors. But we soon surmised that is what had happened: a car passing us on our left had hit our driver’s side door mirror with the mirror of her passing car.
A mixture of shock and anger gripped me when it appeared that the driver, by now four cars ahead, was seemingly making no attempt to pull over and meet us to assess potential damage (as it turned out, despite the noise of the incident, our car strangely had no damage but hers had significant damage to the mirror.)
We could see that she had finally made an effort to pull over to the curb, despite traffic being back-to-back approaching the next intersection. Pulling in behind her, I felt a surge of indignation as I approached her car, not able to see from that angle whether a man or a woman was driving. I am reminded as I write of a maxim I used to teach during therapeutic crisis intervention courses for professionals working with troubled teens: “When we are at our angriest we are at our stupidest!” And so we are.
I approached the driver’s side and, seeing it was a woman, said something pretty close to this, at least attempting to moderate stronger words: “Ma’am, you’re supposed to pull over immediately when you have an accident.” And then I noticed that she had a Children’s Hospital visitor sticker on her sweater and that, hardly before I finished my admonishment, she began to sob.
Her sobs led her to hyperventilate, and so her words were choked out fragments of sentences that at first sounded incoherent: “anxiety,” “brain tumor,” “not from around here.” It took only seconds before the wave of embarrassment, nay, guilt that prompts this writing washed over me. Was it necessary for me to chastise her so quickly? How could my years of clinical training evaporate so quickly over a situation that at its worst could be described as trivial? I felt acutely disgusted at my lack of impulse control, which only worsened an already upsetting situation for her.
My wife convinced her to step out of the car and speak to us. We both tried to diffuse her anxiety and staccato-like breathing by encouraging her to take deep breaths slowly as she choked the words, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” through deep tears and steadying herself with her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” It took several minutes, but she was finally able to tell us about her situation: she lives on the other side of Pittsburgh and is unfamiliar with city driving. Her 10-year-old grandson is a patient in Children’s and scheduled to have neurosurgery on Monday for the removal of a brain tumor. He had been treated for epilepsy since the age of four, but this was a new development. No one could assure her of a good outcome. Her son, the boy’s father, is on the autism spectrum and often struggles to provide the best support for his son. She is on medication and under psychiatric care for chronic anxiety. And yet, she was apologizing to me for whatever damage to the car she may have caused.
In the moment, I struggled to respond in any way that might assuage her anxiety and help her steady herself for the hour-long drive home. And all I could manage was, “I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you. Can we pray for your grandson?” She told us that many people in her Methodist church were aware of her situation and were praying for the family. Then she said, “The Bible tells us that God never gives us more than we can handle, but I think sometimes He does, to remind us that He is in charge, no matter what we do.” To that, we all said Amen.
I am not sure why I used the term “compelled” above to describe the motivation for this writing, but am sure it is at least in part because I have not been able to get her pain and her grandson’s condition out of my head or out of my prayers. In the course of my clinical career and personal life I have had, like most people, many incidents similar if not identical to this one: random, unexpected occurrences that call out for a restrained, compassionate response to another person. Maybe because in my initial response I failed so miserably to patiently assess the actual situation rather than react from anger, albeit meagerly mitigated. Maybe because I could see in this grandmother’s eyes the love for her grandson and the fear of what might come. Maybe because, in my felt failure to be a loving comfort to a stranger in distress, I failed to see the Christ in her. These are the moments presented to us, and I am reminded once more how many times we are offered the chance to love our neighbor and how deeply flawed we are—I am—in any given moment to respond with what demanding grace, not cheap grace, requires of us.
Image Credit: El Greco, “Christ Healing the Blind” (1570)
