What is the most sacred space on earth?
(the following was my answer to this exact same question on Quora)
The most non-religious sacred space I have ever been in was the pediatric intensive care unit (ICU) at Hope Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn Illinois.
11 months ago, only a couple of days before Christmas, I sat alone in the pediatric ICU after a 3 pound cancerous Wilms Tumor had been removed from my 2 year old daughter’s right kidney. It was very late at night and my daughter was sleeping. Tonight was my turn to stay the night relieving my wife.
It had to do be close to midnight and the ICU had the eerie late night feel to it - no more visitors, the only voices the nurses talking among themselves outside. Mostly silence except for the beeping of medical equipment.
As one can imagine, I wasn’t sleeping. Only a week prior I had a perfectly normal 2 year old daughter. But a pediatrician friend had felt something abnormal in my daughter’s abdominal area and insisted that we call a mutual friend who was an oncologist. 48 hours later my wife and I had said a tearful farewell to our daughter as they wheeled her away for surgery to remove the tumor, not knowing what the future held.
Now a day removed from the surgery, the sheer horror of thinking you might lose your daughter to surgery had dissipated, replaced with a fear of the uncertainty of the future - of pathology reports, chemotherapy regiments, radiation. But at that moment, it wasn’t anxiety that I was feeling. Rather, I felt something I can only describe as one of the most profoundly spiritual moments in my life. If spirituality is discovering “the deepest values and meanings by which people live”, I was living such a moment. Sickness and mortality have a tendency to do that to people. The sickness and mortality of your child does it ten fold.
For that reason, that ICU and the lovely generous people who work there will always be sacred to me.
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eimana posted this
