Triage and Trust

I turned on your phone today and searched until the text messages I sent you in ICU appeared. I needed to remind myself that I’d done everything I could to tell you how much I love you and reassure you that we were fighting for you.

Each one spoke of my deep love for you. How you mean everything to me. I reminded you how you'd texted me early on that "we’ve done hard before” and we’d get through this, too. The messages were filled with love and devotion and scripture verses I was clinging to and lyrics to songs that were inspiring and hopeful and encouragement to keep fighting and my confidence that you would beat this. They were cheerleading blurbs, pre-loaded with positive energy, focused on what we wanted and expected and claimed from God, all based on the belief that we should always “stand on our authority” as children of God. Everything I could think of to spur you on, keep your mind focused on the business at hand—getting well again—it was all there, stored on the magic of your smartphone.

I couldn’t read all of them. I was crying too hard. I'd sent the last one on Feb. 16, the day before the palliative doctor usurped Risa’s call and gave us the bad news. You were done fighting and you didn’t want to continue anymore. You wanted to die a natural death.

I shut off your cellphone and put it back in the drawer where I keep it with your Florida Gators sweatshirt and that little piece of fabric that I found wadded up in your pocket for cleaning your glasses. As I closed the drawer, I said for the thousandth time, “That’s why I don’t believe in prayer anymore. Or healing. I only believe in talking to You, God.” Some tell me that’s what prayer is, but what they're really describing is a laundry list where faith is the price of its fulfilment. Well, we did that. We prayed without doubt. Believed without compromise. Faithed without flinching. And we lost it all anyway.

I walked into the kitchen with all of that fresh on my mind, all the words running together, when I realized how much pep talking I was doing in those texts. I'd sent weeks worth of cell phone messages, asking your nurses to read them to you because covid protocol wouldn’t allow us to be there in person while you were fighting for your life on a ventilator.  Everything I texted you was one sided. One desire allowing one outcome. Of course, God would heal you. Anything else was out of the question. It was standard operating procedure, our SOP. Everyone who knew what you were going through was praying their guts out for God to heal you. None of us could imagine a world without Rob McLeod in it.

Except Rob McLeod.

The realization took my breath away, Baby. You knew. You knew for weeks that this one was the one that would take you down. We were hours away from your hospital room. You were there on the frontline fighting for your life. Fighting to breathe. Struggling to stay alive. Facing the truth like the straight up guy you are and relying on the medical experience of your entire career to analyze the situation. You could see the writing on the wall when we refused to look. You knew if you made it out of the hospital, it would be as a broken man facing a life as a vegetable. It was unacceptable.

We were praying for you to live while you were praying to go Home to God.

Slowly, a strong realization rose up in my soul and I knew that in all those weeks I had only considered what I wanted, what I needed, what I thought was best for you and for us. And then it hit me. Nancy was right all along. I talked to her the night before Katy and I drove up to Show Low to ask you in person if you wanted us to let you go. Nancy believes in healing and so did I once. But it’s not our desires that set us free. It’s the truth. “So, you’ve been praying for Rob’s healing while he’s been asking to go Home. Which prayer is God supposed to answer?” she asked me. It was hard. Painful. Impossible to believe. I tucked it away in a corner of my heart where all the difficult things in life are kept under lock and key. Still, I knew. The next day we asked you in person, saw your firm answer, and let you go. You were free. It was our first of many days in prison.

I told God He was a liar the night after we got that call. I had a book full of scriptures and “promises” I’d been keeping to show you once you recovered, and I threw it in the trash. I started calling Him “The God I’m Not Talking To” as I began life as your widow, lost in a whirlwind of pain and shock. I blamed myself for a thousand things I wished I’d done differently, as if I alone have control over anything in this world. I blamed the doctors. The hospital staff. The government, although that one still seems appropriate.

But I missed the truth. I didn’t see it. I was so blinded by disbelief and anguish that I was unable to see it. I suppose timing is everything. If I’d had a glimpse of it before now, I wouldn’t have given it the time of day.

You wanted to go Home. It was your body. It was your life. You love me still with the fervency of true love, but you are a realist. You see the black and the white and have always been a good judge of circumstances, even the horrible, terrible, please-don’t-let-it-happen kind. Some of that was the years you spent doing triage on the side of the road, the horrible job of assessing which patients were the highest priority and discerning which ones would never make it. Some of it was the sturdy faith you always had in God, trusting Him no matter what. The early woundings my heart has suffered make trust difficult for me. You were always the truest version of Jesus I've ever seen in flesh and blood. You loved me like Him, and you trusted Him like I didn’t know how to do.

That day it all came down to the wire. Triage and Trust. It was time. You helped us recognize the unimaginable. You did your best. We did our best. The medical staff did their best. No one wanted it to happen, but you needed us to let you go.

How could that possibly be the right prayer?

I see it now. I was praying wrong. Or, perhaps, it would be more kind for me to say I didn’t know there was another way to pray. And the reason I didn’t know that is because the price of praying for that kind of wisdom is too high. For me. Not for you. I did everything I could to save the man I loved and when that wasn't how it was going to end, I gave you the freedom you asked for. I was praying for healing because I didn't want to let you go. Completely natural. I knew what it would cost me to love you enough to grant what you needed most. It was the last act of love I could give you, but it cost me everything. That's the definition of love.

Finally, standing alone in my kitchen, I was able in some degree to rest in the outcome of what happened, knowing you made that hard call and yours was the prayer that needed to be answered. You simply knew of the two choices facing you, which side of triage was yours.

I was praying for your healing. You were asking to go Home.

Which prayer was God supposed to answer?