Anyone who lives in a northern climate must inevitably come to some reckoning with the descent into this month’s darkness, the steady whittling away of daylight at either end, noontime oftentimes scrubbed to a soapy haze.

To my surprise, this month began on an ascent for me, an elevator rise at the end of November, crammed into a silver metal box on a gurney with my weeping daughters and brother, and an anesthesiologist who might have drawn the short straw to collect the patient in the otherwise sleeping hospital. He was actually assured me he was a much better anesthesiologist than a gurney driver. Bring me back safely to these people, I pleaded.

Here at Dartmouth, I’m in a major medical facility (of which I’ll someday write much more). There’s no illusion that this is giant Health Care. Within this, my tiny 4’8″ body and the fraughtness of grave disease and uncertainty, and so so many patients. Yet all these interwoven days and nights, I’m surrounded by an arch of kindness, by skilled and unskilled staff who labor so patiently. I’m humbled by this secular holiness. The respect is repeated among colleagues here, aiding each other (and all us needy patients) with their own thank you, thank you as they work together.

A friend, driving home to Vermont from family Thanksgiving, leaves me Time of the Child by Niall Williams. Late into the night I read, taking these hours to relearn the slow joy of novel immersion. Sleep, sleep, I urge myself, and yet Williams’ world entrances me. Here’s line from this novel that an elderly Irish country doctor remembers from his doctor father: “The sick are ourselves, was a thing his father had said. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river.“

…. Whatever way this month transpires — for rise or for misery — and it’s all holy, isn’t it, this sacred and profane mixture of spirit and blood and bowel. The journey itself we take together is the gem.

Although I will say, I was ineffably joyous to return from that dismal night and see my curved-to-exhaustion people. After all, I am in the only one in our household who devours the cold leftover French fries with gusto. Why would we waste cold potatoes?

Thank you again, all.