Hoping the paywall doesn’t get in the way, please go read this: an essay by a Jewish doctor tending to a man with severe covid who was covered in tattoos that conveyed that his new ER patient would be happy to see that doctor and the black and Asian nurses tending to him dead.

In that moment, though, the only thing he wanted was to survive and he begged breathlessly for help.

I am grateful for the doctor’s honesty in saying that, internally, it took him a moment to deal with it.

I kept wanting to tell him, it’s okay to be human.

It is clear that the experience left a good man even more determined to be more compassionate towards all. He didn’t get to hear what happened to the guy after that; ER doctors pretty much never do. All he could do was silently wish him well wherever he was now, and hope.

I want to throw in a little of my Mormon faith here: in the life to come, when we come into the presence of the immensity of the Love there, if we have always tried to follow it, whatever we may call it, however we may think of it, every time even someone who doesn’t believe in God at all Thinks Good Thoughts towards the well-being of someone who needs it, we have served that Love.

We will recognize it and belong to it and it will claim us for its own.

Because we always did, by our own choices. No matter what we called ourselves or it here.

Thank heavens for the good examples along the way that help us see how we want to be like when we grow up, all our lives long, like this man.

I wonder if his patient had ever experienced selfless love like that before. I sure hope it changed him for the better.