Three small silver angels

A few years ago, around this time of year, in a town in northern Australia... When my alarm rang that morning, the only thing I wanted was for morning not to have arrived. After several sleepless nights, emotional and physical exhaustion, and less than two hours’ sleep, even imagining ten hours of work was enough to make me want to pick up the phone and say that I could not come in. But only a few days before the Christmas holidays, that would not have been fair to my patients. Rescheduling appointments at the end of the year could mean delays of days or even weeks. Somehow I got up and made my way to the clinic.

As soon as I arrived, the practice manager came to see me. Her eyes were red and wet, signalling that something terrible had happened. She said: “We have cancelled the morning appointments until eleven, after informing the patients, because we have had to place a long and difficult emergency consultation into your schedule. The patient is a father who lost his only three-year-old son in a car accident two days ago and is in a very poor psychological state. A storm caused their car to leave the road and hit a tree. His three-year-old son, sitting in the back seat, was killed, while he, as the driver, suffered only minor scratches. He is in a very distressed state, so he is here with one of our colleagues and a relative, and we have seated them in a separate room rather than the waiting room.”

After that conversation, when the manager left the room, I put my head in my hands for a few moments. I thought about myself and about the broken and suffering man I would soon meet in the room next door. He had no idea how exhausted the person he was about to see was, or how much sorrow from the previous days I was carrying in my own heart. The thought lasted only a few seconds. There was no time to grieve for what I was feeling. I had to gather myself and meet, with all of myself, what remained of this man.

One of his relatives introduced himself in the corridor before we entered the room. After exchanging a few words, he showed me a photograph of Benjamin with his grandfather and told me that the old man was in an even worse state than the child’s parents but did not want to speak to anyone.

When we entered, I saw a young man before me, under thirty. I embraced him. He did not resist. He had kind blue eyes almost lost behind tears. He asked to speak with me alone. We went to my room and sat. For what felt like an endless moment, a silence filled with everything that needed to be said and could not be said settled between us. I knew I had to be the one to break it.

A few minutes later he began telling me the story of his life. He spoke of Benjamin and his little boy’s kindness, and broke into tears again. He told me that in the two days since the crash, the final moments had replayed before his eyes again and again like a film in slow motion, always ending at the moment when he turned and looked towards the back seat. He kept thinking that if there had been no storm, if he had left home a few minutes earlier or later, if the car had veered differently and struck the tree at another angle... thousands of unrealised possibilities, while only one reality had occurred. A sense of regret and guilt that, he felt, would remain with him for the rest of his life.

He said he had thought about suicide repeatedly in those few days. Yet whenever he thought about his father’s suffering after the accident, he felt he could not add further pain to the grief of this old man. He told me he could not look his wife in the eyes, but that she had been kinder than the guilt he was carrying allowed him to be towards himself. He said he had to remain beside them through these difficult days and accept responsibility, perhaps to reduce their suffering even a little.

He removed a necklace from around his neck. It contained a small compartment with three tiny figures representing the angels of love, faith and hope. He had bought it only a few days before the accident, and in the days since he had repeatedly opened the small case and looked at the three silver angels in his palm. Three times one of the angels had fallen from his hand, and each time, when he picked it up, he saw that it was the angel of faith. The third time it slipped from his fingers, he suddenly thought that perhaps—perhaps what he needed at that moment was precisely the angel that kept falling from his hand.