The doors open on the sixth floor and directly across from me is another elevator, it’s doors opening to reveal just one person, too. We look at one another, this woman about my age and I. The plot device that launched a thousand Romcoms. A moment so random yet particular, that it doesn’t feel random at all. We know this. It’s the invisible line connecting us. We’re probably a little amused by it, but maybe a little saddened, too. Each of us in our 50’s– me with my oxygen, she with her IV pole. I wave over at her. A small, rueful wave. She smiles, looks down and away, waves back. Our losses connect for just a moment, and then the doors close, and we vanish, ghosts falling away to the past.

And then closer, there’s birdsong. A long winter finally breaking. Something remembered in the bones, something hopeful returning. And everybody in the elevator at the hospital feels this, too. We’re packed tightly together, but everyone is boisterous and chatty. Like we’re going on an adventure. The porter flirts with another worker, both of them speaking in accents the other can barely decipher. But it doesn’t matter. People are smiling and feeling pretty. Making eye contact and laughing. And the doors open again and a middle-aged couple walk in. The woman, who looks bulletproof, like she commands vast industries, is crying. The man beside her holds her hand. Biting his lip, he looks down. And the way she stood there, looking straight ahead while the tears ran down her face. So unashamed, so brave. The rest of us fell silent in the face of their suffering. Shuffling about we made a little more room for them, letting them penetrate through to the middle. And so we quietly encircled them, and knowing not what else to do, we stood with them and their grief as we descended through the hospital, and then watched as they stepped out into the day, their lives forever changed.

On the eighth floor of the cardiac wing at the Toronto Western Hospital a man sits on a bench near the elevators.

This man has his shoes and socks off, his winter coat on. His feet, which are both resting lightly upon one of his wet shoes that he had turned on its side and covered with a sock, look swollen and cracked. Painful. He sits like this, his eyes closed, the palms of his hands facing upward, his lips moving gently. He has been called to prayer. His feet must not touch the ground. Behind him, there is a window through which you can see a huge, blue sky. The sky looks like it goes on forever. It looks like it’s everywhere. Sunlight takes seven minutes to reach the earth, and at the end of the journey it falls through this hospital window, illuminating a praying man. It’s all such a mystery. And all the people streaming in and out of the elevator give him a hard look when they first catch a glimpse of his exposed, wounded feet, but after a moment the looks become softer, much softer– each one of us there, now in the midst of prayer, too.