My daughter was hospitalized fifty times before she turned five. In that sterile world, she was more than a patient—she was a star. Doctors, captivated by her rare condition and radiant spirit, huddled around her bedside to study her blood disease. Over time, some stopped by at odd hours just to visit. In the hospital, where her swollen red gums didn’t provoke the same alarm they did in the outside world, she smiled easily. No one objected when she began welcoming new patients with a tour. She’d wheel her IV through the corridors, her yellow Sesame Street hospital gown brushing the floor, as she oriented first timers to their strange new environment. She’d point out the snack room where they could fill up on all the apple juice and popsicles they could ever want, the playroom where she revealed the cubbies where the best toys were stored. When she got to the treatment room, her voice would drop. “This is the torture room.” She’d place her little arm around the child’s shoulder and whisper. “They hurt you here, but that’s how you get better.”
Leta paid dearly for the love and attention she received in the hospital—bone marrow biopsies, spinal taps, blood draws, surgeries. But the procedures didn’t wound her as deeply as the losses. Some children left with discharge papers and bright futures. Others, wheeled on gurneys to the ICU, never returned.
Looking back, I remember hauling my briefcase full of periodicals to her hospital room, though I never once opened it. Instead, I lingered in a world slowed by illness—wandering the halls with my daughter, playing tic-tac-toe for hours. I hadn’t yet realized how the confines of her illness had freed me from the frantic pace of my life. Her home away from home had, unexpectedly, become a sanctuary for me.
Now, Leta’s home away from home is beneath a walnut tree in a cemetery beside the school she once attended. In the early years after losing her, I spent hours by her gravestone, speaking as if she could hear me, playing the Indian chant she loved. I lit candles, planted flowers with friends, and wandered her new neighborhood, pausing at the graves of other young souls.
Home has always been central to my being. The idea of a home away from home came later, but I have come to cherish the thought of finding sanctuary in favorite places—a stand of cottonwoods along a desert stream, a backyard tree with a rope swing, a friend’s front porch. I think it’s wise to cultivate as many of these places as possible.
These days I’m journaling about all the homes away from home that I can imagine for my life—my way of expanding my sense of belonging in this world.