A few weeks ago, I wrote about working in a pediatric emergency department. About The Pitt. About warm blankets and the strange gift of showing up on someone’s worst night.
I ended that essay thinking fondly about a place I hadn’t been in five years. I talked about taking the staff donuts. I never did it.
Then the batsignal went up.
On Wednesday, I got a group text. A former co-worker — a day shift nurse I knew mostly by reputation — had died. It was shocking and it didn’t make sense. A former nurse manager, Becca, sent a message to a few people. It essentially said: Come to Factory 52 Thursday night. Let’s be together.
I wasn’t sure I should go.
I didn’t technically work in the ED. My job duties were largely there, but my department was a consult service. Still, I spent most of my time with that staff and considered them colleagues and friends. But I had a tinge of anxiety about showing up. I left five years ago. Would anyone even remember me?
I got there early and walked toward the mosaic globe in the courtyard and found a small cluster of people I sort of recognized. My chest did the thing it does when you’re not sure you’re welcome somewhere.
Then a nurse I’d worked with saw me and hugged me like I’d never left. Then Dr. Wendy spotted me across the crowd and shouted, “Kirk from PIRC!” — which is exactly how I was known back then. Kirk from PIRC was memorable. Catchy. It rhymed. I had forgotten that moniker existed.
The people kept coming.
By the time everyone gathered, the courtyard was full. Paul the chaplain said a few words about love winning, about holding on to each other in tragedy. Then Becca spoke — about the three minutes it took her to write that text, about how she had no idea what the response would be, about how if any of us ever felt alone or helpless or hopeless, we should look at what was standing in this courtyard right now.
Here’s the thing about emergency medicine: it takes something from you. The hours. The adrenaline. The particular weight of being present on the worst day of a stranger’s life, over and over, sometimes in the same shift. You just move to the next case. You don’t process it. You can’t.
Many of the people in that courtyard had moved on. Different jobs, different chapters. And yet.
One text. Three minutes.
We took a group photo. I’m in the back, on the right. Dr. Wendy was insistent on it — but I think we all knew it would serve as something more than a record. It would be proof of what love looks like when it shows up.
Nobody was required to come. Nobody punched a clock for it. There were no charts to document, no attending to brief. Just a shared understanding that we needed to be there.
I showed up worried that I was intruding, that I’d been gone too long, or that I’d never really been part of it to begin with. I had thought about those donuts for a couple of weeks and never brought them. Maybe some part of me always wondered if I’d show up when it actually mattered.
But I went. And so did everyone else.
The globe in the middle of the greenspace at Factory 52 is made of hundreds of separate pieces of colored glass. None of those pieces know the work they’re doing. They don’t get to see the full picture.
Last night, we did.
Kirk Sheppard is a therapist, author, and theater blogger in Cincinnati. He turned 50 this week, and he’s writing about it all year. Go to kirksheppard.com for more.
Also, read Kirk’s love letter to nurses, the short story “Stay,” available here.