Before

Dad holding baby Sammy in the preemie ward.

After my father, Paul, had a stroke, in the summer of 1979, when I was 20 years old, an ER doctor told my stepmother, Sue, and me that he almost certainly wouldn’t survive.

I was devastated. Just a few days earlier, he had been the vibrant, delightful man whose joy was my joy. Now he lay in a coma — and the expert was saying he had no future.

As I stood there, stunned, behind the unused reception desk outside the ER that my stepmother and I had made our own temporary headquarters, Sue, all 5-foot-3 of her, simply looked up at the tall young doctor and said, “That’s not how we look at it!”

I regarded her with surprise, but she seemed resolute. And then I felt it, too: That wasn’t how we looked at it.

I caught her courage. And then I nurtured it inside myself, throughout the next few months, as I spent nearly 24 hours a day at his bedside in the hospital, until one day Dad suddenly came out of his coma.

It was a miracle, another doctor said.

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Three years earlier, doctors in the preemie ward at that same hospital had told Paul and Sue that their youngest son, Sam, who had been born three months prematurely, at 1 pound, 10 ounces, would not survive. They could not wean him off of the respirator; though he had put on some weight, he was not “thriving.” They said there was nothing they could do.

My father took the next week off from his job as a middle-school teacher and spent each day in the preemie ward, holding little Sammy, rocking him and singing to him. When Sammy began to gasp and cough, Dad put him back in the respirator. Then, a bit later, when the tiny boy was comfortable again, Dad would take him back out and sing some more.

At the end of that week, Sam had no more need of the respirator. He could breathe all on his own. He was thriving. And he could finally go home.

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Dear reader, I live with you now in Before. It feels like forever that I’ve been in terror of what might come After, and now After is only a day away (or longer, depending on how things play out). In my typically timid fashion, I’ve vainly tried to keep my mind off of what might be — at its worst, a stochastic fascism that sweeps away our fragile democratic endeavor. But then I’ve read (on this platform, and elsewhere) about people working hard to keep democracy going. They’ve inspired me to do what I can, reaching out to potential voters. And I’ve thought about Sue and Paul — both of them now gone — and how they didn’t let fear overwhelm them, or rob them of their agency.

You have been with me through some recent hard personal times, and I have gratefully felt your support. Now together we share this fraught political moment — and I want you to know that I am with you, in fear but also in hope: tremendous hope, actually.

Forty-five years after my stepmother stared down that young doctor, that’s how I look at it.