A Tale of Two Emmas, and of Hurricane Sandy

The hardest things in life reveal who we are and what is really important.  No great revelation there.  In Sandy's aftermath, we are besieged with heart rending stories of people doing what some people do under stress -- trading our daily pettiness for some truly meaningful selflessness.  No doubt some of these people look at themselves every day with some level of disgust, thinking they should be better, or more noble, or more patient, as we all do. Caught in a sticky web of circumstance, however, some people find a reservoir of strength unapparent in their daily lives.  Sometimes a reporter happens by and catches it and millions of people get to participate in that moment.

One such story is this week's tale of the evacuation of NYU Langone Medical Center.  The hospital basement generators failed during the storm, and administrators made the difficult decision to evacuate the entire hospital population, including those most vulnerable -- premature babies, swaddled and wearing little striped caps, with all the trappings of the NICU--ventilators and monitors and feeding tubes. The image of one fragile preemie, Emma Sophia, being carried down 15 fights of stairs in the arms of a nurse who ventilated her with a bag as she descended, caught in my throat.

Seventeen years ago that very night at another hospital far away, our family had a storm of our own.  We delivered our own preemie -- another Emma, in fact, who came into the world unexpectedly two and a half months early with a crowd of anxious people standing in the wings cheering her on. At 2 pounds, 13 ounces, she surely needed some cheering. And praying. And some complicated medical support and expertise, offered by kind and intent professionals wearing scrubs who ministered both to her and to us.

Premature birth is traumatic, and it has a long recovery period both for the infant and the parents.  We have expectations of how things will be, and when they turn out much differently, it changes us.  Emma Sophia's mother was already emotionally impaired by the premature birth; to hear that her tiny child was being moved during the storm of the century without her there to oversee the process -- well, I could not imagine her despair.  My mother's heart broke as she related her story on CNN.

Natural disasters reveal what a thin veneer civilization really is. The material trappings of safety and security are so easily damaged and torn, and the choices and actions of a single person become proportionately more significant. So what is the takeaway from my retelling of the story of Sandy and the two Emmas? Not much wisdom here, except to say that perhaps it's good for humankind to be reminded not to build our lives around expectations of comfort and convenience.

Garrison Keillor tells a story about how students at Lake Wobegon Elementary were assigned a "storm home," in the event a blizzard occurred and students were unable to get back to their parents.  A safe harbor, as it were. He related how as a child he had taken great comfort in imagining his "storm family" and how kind they would be to him. It's good to be reminded that on any given day, our actions could mean everything to someone else, when our stuff can be wiped out by fire and rain.

Heroism as a word is virtually meaningless from overuse in modern society. Give me kindness over heroism any day. I recall so very clearly moments in which our own emotional tempest of our Emma's premature birth was placed in stark contrast to the kindness of those who just wanted to make something easier for us. I will never forget those people.  Let's remember that when it comes down to it, looking not just to our own interests -- but to the interests of others -- transforms the broken world we live in at its most broken moments.