Grace in the Waiting Room

At the Cancer Clinic
by Ted Kooser

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

She is not elderly. The young woman on stage in this Ted Kooser poem is being helped along by her sisters, both of them young, he says, suggesting she is too. That she is not elderly sharpens the sadness. Cancer seems most villainous when it chooses the young. 

I'd like to think that she may recover, but nothing in the poem suggests it. For her, it's a "great distance" to the examining room. She's slumped; her sisters  bend "to the weight of an arm," while that nurse in her white smock calls "encouragement." Her life is in danger.

The miracle of very real situation is that "There is no restlessness or impatience/or anger anywhere in sight," so decidedly different is what we're seeing from what we witness so regularly in the rest of the world. What's here in the waiting room is grace, Kooser says, gifts flowing from all directions--nothing less hard to find than love itself.

"Blessed are the pure in spirit," Jesus said, the first of the beatitudes, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Her case looks dire. I don't think Kooser sees this young cancer patient recovering. The woman in "her funny knit cap" is anything but arrogant.

But that doesn't mean that what Mr. Koozer witnessed one day "at the cancer clinic" is horror. What he sees is a testimony of grace so visible that the waiting room, just for a moment, is stunned by the rare beauty of sheer selflessness.

Today, we're in the middle of an epidemic ravishing families around the world, tens of thousands of ERs crowded with pestilence, so many--too many--people dying alone. Here in the U. S. daily deaths are right now, once again, exceeding a thousand a week.

But this too. Every day, every hour, every minute--someone with "the straight, tough bearing of courage" is helping someone, even those of us who are cancer free, towards the open door of the kingdom of heaven. 

Giving is one of those rare gifts that gives on giving. Ted Koozer's poem takes note of grace, and that's a blessing for which I'm thankful this morning.