“We have so many people praying for her that I just know, I feel, that the prayers are going to help her get through this,” I said.
“My belief in God is not as strong after my husband died in that car accident,” Aunt Laurie said. “You do not know why these things happen. Bad things happen and God is not always there. When I saw those six kids die this month, I didn’t see God intervening. You have to sign the DNR. If you don’t and her heart stops, the PICU team will crack open her chest to try to revive her. You don’t want that for Emily. You don’t want that to be your last sight of her. You want peace.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, although with Aunt Laurie saying all these things it was harder for me to believe the words coming out of my mouth. “Emily’s going to make it.”
Kari and I went back into Emily’s room, she to the armchair and me to the chair next to Emily’s bed. It was horrible to see her like that, so swollen that her head was misshapen. Her skin was tight and splotched with purple, and her eyes were taped shut. Kari had taken thousands of photos and videos of Emily in the last two years, documenting every part of the illness. At this moment, when Emily looked so unlike herself, Kari insisted we take no photographs. She did not want to remember Emily this way.
I was lost in my own confusion. I couldn’t sign that DNR for Emily because I knew if I did it would feel like I was giving up, like I was signing away her chance for survival. In that way, Aunt Laurie was right about the hope that I clung to so fiercely even at this moment when all the signs said Emily was not going to make it. If she didn’t pull through, I’d be a different person on the other side of this. Kari would be, too.
When Robin had left Emily’s room, he’d gone to the front desk to ask if they could find someone to give Emily the anointing of the sick. At first they called in a minister, but Robin, being a devoted Catholic, politely told him he needed a priest, so the nurse called another number.
I saw Ariana standing outside Emily’s room by herself, and her face was oddly joyful, as though she, of all the other people who were trying to talk straight to me, shared my faith about Emily.
“There’s going to be a miracle in that room,” she said. “We just have to hold the space for that miracle.”
I took her hand and she put her other hand over mine, as if we were praying.
“I’m glad you see it, Ariana,” I said. “There’s just two of us who do, so we’ve got to stay strong together.”
The monsignor who arrived to minister to Emily performed anointing of the sick, the preparation for being received into the hands of the Lord, to absolve her of her sins so that she could receive the mercy of the church, and viaticum, the Holy Communion that would provide her with spiritual food for the journey to heaven. I watched the priest praying over Emily, and I was buoyed up by his message of hope, not resignation: “God our Father, we have anointed your child Emily with the oil of healing and peace. Caress her, shelter her, and keep her in your tender care. We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord. Amen.”
I know the monsignor could sense my discomfort at his presence invoking Emily’s final journey to the Lord. He motioned me out into the hallway to comfort me, too, not just to consecrate Emily’s remains into the Lord’s care.
“There’s been one confirmed miracle at this hospital, and it was a little boy on a ventilator just like your daughter,” he said. “He was barely clinging to this world, but he was still here. Two nights in a row, another little boy would appear from the elevator and come to visit the sick boy.
“The sick boy was Chucky McGivern, who was here back in the 1980s. He had smallpox and a fatal kidney disease called Reye’s syndrome. His condition was grave. His relatives gave the family religious medals, including one of our local saint, Saint John Neumann, the fourth bishop of Philadelphia. Do you know anything about Saint John Neumann?”
I had to confess that I did not.
“He is a saint of healing,” the monsignor said. “There are many miracles connected to him, times when a child was at the edge of death and the family brought the spirit of Saint John Neumann and the child was healed, like this little boy.”
The monsignor explained that Chucky’s mom, Nancy, said she didn’t believe in miracles, except for the chosen, and she didn’t feel her family was chosen. Nonetheless, she placed the three medals of the saints on a safety pin, with Saint John Neumann at the center, and pinned them to Chucky’s pillow. Her cousin gave her a relic, a piece of cloth from one of Saint John Neumann’s robes, which Nancy pinned to the other side of Chucky’s pillow.
The next day the doctors told the McGiverns that Chucky had only a 10 percent chance of living; his lungs had collapsed, and his kidneys had stopped working, just like Emily’s. The family signed the DNR that I could not make myself sign.
When they returned from signing the DNR, the nurses told the McGiverns that they’d found a little boy in the room, standing at Chucky’s bedside. He was about ten or eleven years old and dressed in a scruffy manner, with a tattered plaid jacket and round glasses, and he had a
