The nurse wheeled our child away and my husband held the wall up so he would not crumble. Blue corridors were both cocoon and prison and the doctors urged us to walk out the glass doors of the hospital to leave it all behind. Wraith-like we fled and life around us carried on; we waited and drank coffee that we didn't want surrounded by people who didn't know and we sat like people in a coffee shop while the surgeon cut and sliced, patched and stitched and we waited thinking only of the unsteady beat of our child's broken heart.
Helen Magner is a writer and teacher, reader and eternal optimist.