What I Never Saw

As part of my job, I visit some patients at a local hospital. My agency has a small office on the eighth floor of this hospital. I am in it for at least an hour or two several days a week.

Across the hall from that office there is a set of double doors which I had never seen opened, and to which I had never paid any attention. But last week when I came up in the elevator, those doors were opened. To my astonishment, there was a six-bed cardiac intensive care unit not ten feet from the office in which I had been sitting for a year. I had been completely unaware of its existence. I actually had to stand still and refocus my eyes and mind, because it had changed that familiar landscape so dramatically.

It reminded me of the way things are between people; that you can know someone well for a long time in certain ways, and still never know about some of the important parts of their lives. Not, that is, unless you happen by some day when the doors are open.