The Christmas Homecoming

He arrived with much fanfare. Clad in a brightly orange suit, with two escorts on each side. He made a jingling sound with every small step he made. People turned around and looked as he walked and passed through the hospital corridors, for it was an unusual sight to see.  But he did not mind their glaring stares. He came for a special purpose, and that’s what matters. He came to see his father.

His father laid in our ICU. He suffered an acute and severe bleed to his head. The bleeding was so extensive that he required a neurosurgical procedure to evacuate the large collection of blood inside his skull, and placed a shunt in his brain to relieve the high pressure, in an effort to save his life.

However despite of all the intervention, his condition did not improve. In fact, it even got worse. After the surgery, he had more bleeding and swelling to his brain. And no further surgery could fix or decompress the pressure that was squashing his brain. There were no “miracle” medicines that can be infused on him that would make him better. No further medical intervention left that could be done to save him. His condition was unsurvivable. Sooner or later, all the life-sustaining machines  hooked on him would be deemed worthless as he would be pronounced brain-dead.

Due to the grim development of events, the patient’s family were all in agreement to discontinue all life support. Though they had one request before that happens. They pleaded for the patient’s son to come before he dies. A son who had not seen his father for a long time.

In the past 10 years that I have been an ICU physician, I have signed for diverse medical and non-medical requests – a disability form for a patient who was critically ill, a leave of absence for a relative who’s loved one was in our ICU, a letter to the military requesting for a deployed soldier overseas to be permitted to come home to be with his mother in her last days, or a letter to the US consulate for a patient’s mother in a foreign country requesting for a visa to see her son, who was in near-death.

This time I signed a request for a detainee to be released briefly from prison, to visit his dying father.

And so he came.

The brightly colored clothes was not because it was the holiday season, but it was the standard issued jumpsuit from the prison. The jingling sounds as he walked, was not from trinkets or bells to announce some holiday cheer, but rather from the chink of the chains that binds his ankles. He brought no gifts as he came empty-handed, except for the handcuffs. There were guards that flanked him as he made his way through, and people watched and stared, but it was not a parade.

He was led into the ICU room where his father laid. Her mother who was at the bedside, cryingly welcomed him with open arms. It was an embrace of acceptance to their “wayward” son. Like a homecoming of a prodigal son, if you will. Yes, it was a sort of homecoming alright. A very sad homecoming indeed.

As the son stood silently beside the bed of his comatose and dying father, the tears began to flow from him. Prison, I supposed, did not harden him enough to be devoid of all emotions. If only his father can see his tears, but it was too late. Whatever demons he had in the past, and I don’t care to know, he was still human after all. Just like you and me.

Was the tears for his father, who he knew he failed, and who he would never see again? Or was the tears for himself, as he had caused his family such heartache and disgrace? Was it tears of painful loss and farewell? Or was it tears of remorse and repentance? Or maybe it was a combination of all of those reasons. Whatever it was, he alone knows.

There will be no singing of Christmas carols, I guess, in his dark and lonely cell tonight.