The Healing Journey

May 10, 2025

One Saturday morning, Margaret got an email from a woman she had met ten years ago, asking, “Do you remember me?” Allie said she was pregnant with her third child and was going to be at the hospital where Margaret worked in the intensive care unit.

Yes, the memory was still fresh. It had been a decade since Allie’s mother had died.

When they finally met up, they began to reminisce. She had two boys and was pregnant with a daughter.

“She remembered about when I first met her and she yelled at me when I went into her mother’s room,” Margaret recalled. “She actually apologized for yelling at me ten years earlier.”

Her mother had been transferred from another hospital to Margaret’s unit. She had cancer that had spread so rapidly, but nobody had told the family before she was transferred. As Margaret recalled, “I went into the room with the assumption that the family already knew the severity of the prognosis, but they didn’t, and Allie got really upset and yelled at me, and I felt awful. They didn’t know their mother was dying.”

She learned that the young woman’s father had died of cancer when she was only 6, and to add to their tragedy, she had just gotten engaged to her high school sweetheart and had set a date to be married the following summer.

“All she really wanted was to have her mom at her wedding, and I said, “Let’s see. We can probably make that happen.”

Within 24 hours, she arranged to have a wedding at the hospital with her mother and family and friends. They took Allie to get a wedding dress, and they arranged for the hospital to provide food. They got flowers and a gift.

“She had the wedding at her mother’s bedside and her mother died shortly afterward,” Margaret said.

Ten years later, she returned to see the doctor.

“She was going to have a little girl, and she brought me a gift,” Margaret said. “She was like, ‘I know, Doctor, this is really cheesy, but I want you to have this. I made it for you.’ It was a heart with words her mother told her before she died: ‘Remember, if you want to get love, you have to give love.’”

Margaret was working on Mother’s Day weekend when Allie had her baby girl.

“I went up to see her, and she was so excited for me to hold the baby and take pictures,” Margaret said. “It was really great to see her husband, the two boys and the new baby. She’s really just trying to deal with the loss of her mom.”
©Joseph Pisani

***