Art by Pete Whitehead
In the early morning hours at the Cleveland Clinic, Aaron's grandmother was preparing for major heart surgery. When a chaplain entered her room to offer a prayer, Aaron began noticing something extraordinary in the voices coming from the hospital rooms around him. Different prayers, different languages, different beliefs, but one unmistakably human sound.
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The Team:
Story Created & Performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional Vocals: Cori Calafato
Original Theme Music: thomas j. duke
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TRANSCRIPT
It's always struck me how vulnerable somebody looks when they're lying in a hospital bed.
It doesn't even have to be for anything serious. It could be for a blood draw. It could be for something simple.
But you take a person, put them on their couch at home, and put a little blanket over them. Take that picture. Then take a picture of that same person lying in a hospital bed with the hospital blanket over them.
Two totally different stories.
Put Hulk Hogan in a hospital bed, and it's that same story.
And that's how my grandmother looked.
Not like Hulk Hogan. She looked like my grandmother.
But she was scared because she was getting ready for heart surgery. Major heart surgery.
I was in the hospital room, and so was Cori. We had woken up at 3:00 a.m., driven her there, gone through all the admissions at the Cleveland Clinic, and gotten her ready for a 5:00 a.m. surgery.
We were exhausted, and we were just trying to fill the space with conversation that kept her in a good state of mind.
I'm not going to sit there and talk about the risks involved. You try to navigate the conversation so that you make the person feel comfortable, loved, and optimistic, in spite of how vulnerable and scared they are.
And I was trying to do my best.
I was making jokes, and I said something like, "Hey, Grandma, you know, it's kind of a young age to be getting a surgery like this."
The thing is, she was relatively healthy. Very healthy, in fact, for most of her life up until this point. And it wasn't even that she was unhealthy.
She just had this heart condition that had developed, and her doctor said it was very risky if she didn't have the surgery.
Even though having the surgery was risky, especially at her age, the doctor believed the outcome would likely be good and that she could have many more years.
So she took that gamble.
And there we were.
Next thing you know, there's a knock on the door.
I turn around, and it's the guy with the little white collar around his neck.
The chaplain.
He smiles at us, says hello, looks at my grandmother, and says, "Hey, you want me to come in and say a prayer for you?"
And my grandmother says, "Of course."
She invites him in.
I don't know what denomination he was. Christian, I'm assuming. My grandmother's Catholic, so they had a connection there.
He goes and sits next to her on the hospital bed, and as soon as he does, she puts her hand on his hand and kind of holds it there.
And he begins to recite the Lord's Prayer.
"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
I kind of bow my head, and Cori does the same.
But I'm peeking out through one of my eyes because I felt like I needed to see this.
I'm watching my grandma receive this prayer, and something all of a sudden hits me.
It was a very profound insight.
Look, on the surface, it just looks like a thing that you do, right? These customs that we have.
But in that moment, I really examined it.
There's this person we don't know who's come into the room. My grandma welcomes him, and now she's holding his hand.
She's squeezing it.
And I'm looking at my grandma, and she doesn't look older, seasoned, or whatever she wants me to call her.
She doesn't look like a grandma.
She looks like a child.
I don't mean that disrespectfully, but just in the sense of how she was holding his hand and how she had given herself to this moment of prayer.
It was like this strange transformation.
She looked like she was four or five years old.
Her eyes were closed, and she was so intentional about listening to this prayer.
And as that's hitting me, I begin to notice other sounds in the hallway.
Not just the regular hospital sounds.
In fact, in this moment, the hospital sounds begin to soften.
I can hear the prayer happening with my grandma, but then I start hearing other prayers happening down the hallway.
I can hear one prayer in a different language.
I can hear another coming from a room full of people praying together. It was almost like a mantra. A different religion than I had heard before, but it was this mantra of people in one room praying together.
It was quite beautiful.
And then I can hear another room.
It wasn't a prayer, or at least not an official prayer.
It was just this really poignant conversation between two people.
And I could hear one of them say:
"When they put you to sleep, I will be here. I promise. And when you wake up, I'll be here. I will never, never leave you. And I love you."
Hearing that, witnessing it even from a different room, felt so sacred.
And take away all the religiosity and all the dogma of whatever room, whatever prayer, including the prayer happening in my grandmother's room.
Take away all of that.
They all, in my ears, came together like a chorus.
The sounds merged together, if that makes sense.
They lost their linguistic meaning, and there was just this one tonality.
And what was so fascinating was that they all sounded the same.
The tonality all sounded the same.
And the only way I can describe it is this:
The sound of human beings.
The sounds of human beings calling out for hope in the face of the unknown.
Human beings calling out for hope in the face of the unknown.
And as soon as the chaplain ended the prayer with my grandmother, it was like I snapped out of it.
But I could never forget what I'd just felt in those few moments.
Next thing I know, there's this really muscular guy standing in the room next to my grandmother, and he's going to wheel her to surgery.
She says goodbye to the chaplain and thanks him.
I give her a hug and a kiss. Cori does the same thing.
And this guy wheels her out.
I can hear her making comments about how strong his arms are.
And then she says something to the effect of, "Well, I hope when I wake up from my surgery that you'll be right next to me. I hope you're there."
So she kind of breaks the tension.
It was really awesome.
Those were the last words we heard as she was being wheeled down the hallway.
And so, I don't know if it was the prayers or just the incredible skills of the doctors, but her surgery went great.
And Grandma's doing fine.