A nurse took the tired, anxious serviceman to
the bedside.
“Your son is here,” she said to the old man.
She had to repeat the words several times before the patient’s eyes opened.
Heavily sedated because of the pain of his
heart attack, he dimly saw the young uniformed Marine standing outside the
oxygen tent. He reached out his hand. The Marine wrapped his toughened fingers
around the old man’s limp ones, squeezing a message of love and encouragement.
The nurse brought a chair so that the Marine
could sit beside the bed. All through the night the young Marine sat there in
the poorly lighted ward, holding the old man’s hand and offering him words of
love and strength. Occasionally, the nurse suggested that the Marine move away
and rest awhile.
He refused. Whenever the nurse came into the
ward, the Marine was oblivious of her and of the night noises of the hospital –
the clanking of the oxygen tank, the laughter of the night staff members
exchanging greetings, the cries and moans of the other patients.
Now and then she heard him say a few gentle
words. The dying man said nothing, only held tightly to his son all through the
night.
Along towards dawn, the old man died. The
Marine released the now lifeless hand he had been holding and went to tell the
nurse. While she did what she had to do, he waited.
Finally, she returned. She started to offer
words of sympathy, but the Marine interrupted her.
“Who was that man?” he asked.
The nurse was startled, “He was your father,”
she answered.
“No, he wasn’t,” the Marine replied.
“I never saw him before in my life.”
“Then why didn’t you say something when I
took you to him?”
“I knew right away there had been a mistake,
but I also knew he needed his son, and his son just wasn’t here. When I
realized that he was too sick to tell whether or not I was his son, knowing how
much he needed me, I stayed.”
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