However, the moment I pulled back the curtain to Bay 6, I froze in my tracks, my breath catching in my throat. The harsh, fluorescent reality of the hospital seemed to dissolve into something softer, warmer, and undeniably sacred. Mr. Abernathy wasn't slumped in his chair in despair; he was sitting upright, his gaunt face illuminated by a peace so profound it looked like radiance. The room was incredibly quiet, but not the empty silence of loneliness—it was the heavy, pregnant silence of a deep conversation that has just paused. The air smelled faintly of ozone and roses, completely masking the harsh scent of antiseptic that permeated the rest of the floor. Mr. Abernathy looked at me, his eyes clear and sparkling, free of the cloudy haze of morphine I had expected. Before I could even say hello, he smiled - a genuine, ear-to-ear smile that shed years off his tired face - and gestured to the empty vinyl chair next to his infusion pump. "I'm glad you're here," he said, his voice surprisingly strong. "But you’ll have to pull up another chair. As you can see, this one is taken." I stared at the empty seat. To my eyes, it was vacant, but my heart hammered a different rhythm. A wave of heat rushed over me, starting at my scalp and moving down to my toes, a sensation of pure, unadulterated love that brought instant tears to my eyes. "He’s been telling me about the garden waiting for me," Mr. Abernathy whispered, looking fondly at the empty space. "He told me that the pain is just a shadow, and shadows can’t exist where we are going."
I sat on a stool in the corner, too overwhelmed to speak, watching a dying man commune with a presence I couldn't see but could feel in every fiber of my being. For the next hour, Mr. Abernathy nodded and listened to the silence, occasionally laughing softly, his vitals on the monitor holding steady at a level of calm that shouldn't have been possible for someone in his condition. Two weeks later, I braced myself when I went to the nurse's station to ask about him, expecting to hear that he had passed. Instead, the head oncologist called me over, holding a clipboard with a look of utter bewilderment on his face. He explained that Mr. Abernathy’s latest scans showed that the aggressive tumor growth had not only stopped but had inexplicably begun to recede. They called it a "spontaneous regression," a rare statistical anomaly that they couldn't explain with medicine. But as I walked back to Bay 6 to see him, I knew exactly what or Who was responsible. We treat cancer with medicine, radiation, and surgery, and those are gifts, but I learned that Tuesday that there is another medicine that enters the room when we run out of options. Mr. Abernathy didn't just find a cure for his body that day; he found the assurance that even in the deepest valley, we never, ever walk alone.
