The message

A tune I couldn’t shake, a book Naomi brought home, a song, and a moment in the hospital parking lot — they began to form a pattern.

The tune

Since Naomi suffered that devastating cardiac arrest, I started noticing things that would normally have escaped my attention. Actually, that unwanted journey we were on began five days before the cardiac arrest, on a Monday. That morning, I arrived at my office early and started humming a tune. It got stuck in my head, and I kept humming it over and over — not just that Monday, but all week until Friday. Gradually, some words emerged: “Here comes the sun… Little darling… It’s all right.”

Then came that horrific Friday night, when we rushed Naomi to the hospital. I was in the ambulance with her and completely panicked. The entire trip I kept shouting, “Naomi! Naomi, wake up!” I simply couldn’t imagine losing her. When we arrived, Naomi was rushed into the resuscitation room. I wanted to follow but was stopped at the door and told to wait outside. Suddenly, I was alone in a dimly lit hallway. Silence hung in the air, broken only by the flickering and buzzing of a faulty tube light at the far end. The sharp, cold wind blew in from outside. I shivered, looked down and saw I had no shoes on, and my socks were soaked from the rain.

That was the moment I turned to God. Distressed and devastated, I pleaded: “I know I never came to you, but please help Naomi. Please don’t let her die.”

A few days later, when things became especially difficult, the tune came back to me. I wondered whether Naomi, our little darling, might indeed be all right again. Could it be that, despite everything that had happened, there was still light at the end of the tunnel? The thought lasted only briefly. I was soon pulled back into our harsh reality and forgot about the tune.

It was agonising to know that Naomi was in a life-threatening condition and that we could not even see her. She was alone in an ICU room, and we were not allowed to be with her. I reckoned the only way I could somehow be there and comfort her was by recording my voice on the MP3 player I had been gifted just a week earlier and asking the staff to place it next to her bed. That way, at least, she could hear my voice.

The book

I left the hospital and drove back to our apartment. When I arrived, I ran to my desk and grabbed the MP3 player. Unsure what to record, I rushed to the girls’ bedroom and started going through their bookshelf, looking for a story Naomi would enjoy. Then I remembered her school poetry notebook. Every week, a new funny poem was glued into it, and Naomi and I often read them together. That was it. I would record myself reading those poems.

After some frantic searching, I suddenly realised the notebook might still be in her school bag. I ran to the dining room, found the bag, opened it, reached inside, and grabbed the first thing I touched. As I pulled it out, time seemed to slow. It wasn’t Naomi’s poetry notebook. It was a book with a big, bright yellow sun on the cover. I froze. That sun instantly brought back the tune I had been humming all week. Naomi had brought this book home on the very day she suffered her cardiac arrest. For days I had been unconsciously humming Here Comes the Sun — and now, here it was, sitting in her bag.

The song

I hurried to the study, turned on my computer, and typed those four words into Google. It turned out to be a song by The Beatles. A simple song of hope, of believing that better days are ahead. How appropriate.

After sitting down and reading the lyrics for a while, I relaxed a bit. It had been a few days since we’d last seen Naomi, since she’d disappeared into the ICU, but it felt like an eternity. We missed her desperately and longed to be with her. As the lyrics put it, it truly felt like a long, cold, lonely winter.

Once I had composed myself, I read through the poems and recorded my voice on the MP3 player. When I was done, I took Naomi’s book and drove back to the hospital, replaying what had just happened in my mind and thinking about the words of the song.

Back at the hospital, I hurried to Paulina, who was still sitting beside the closed ICU doors. They’d become our waiting place. Every time a staff member came or left and the doors briefly opened, we hoped — in vain — to catch a glimpse of Naomi.

I asked Paulina to come with me to a quieter spot so we could talk for a moment. Standing together in the corner of a silent hallway, I told her about the tune I had been humming and showed her Naomi’s book. As I shared what had happened at home, I told her that it felt like a message meant for us — that, for reasons we could not yet understand, this disaster had happened, but that in the end Naomi would be all right again.

I realised how strange that sounded even as I said it.

The song had come to me five days before Naomi collapsed. And then, several days later, the book — almost like a reminder — appeared. It may very well have been coincidence, but it felt as though these moments were somehow connected, even if I couldn’t quite make sense of it.

Every Friday afternoon, Naomi’s class went to the library so each child could choose a book to read over the weekend. On that particular day, from the hundreds of books she could have picked, Naomi brought home one with a big, bright sun on the cover.

It could just as easily have meant nothing at all. Still, it didn’t feel that way to me.

That week, the weather in Shanghai was absolutely dreadful. It was cold, it constantly rained, and everything looked grey and miserable. We felt miserable too. And yet, deep down, after what I had just experienced, I sensed an unusual calmness — which felt out of place, almost unsettling, given all the fear and anxiety that had gripped us.

So I said to Paulina, “Let’s believe it’s all right. Let’s wait for the rain to stop and the sun to shine.”

The sun

The dreadful weather outside was not nearly as depressing as the mood inside the hospital. The waiting area beside the ICU was filled with desperate parents, and commotion arose each time another child was admitted.

One afternoon, as I stood near the ICU doors, a small child was transferred out of the unit in a blue body bag. It was a horrific sight. On another day, we saw a severely ill little girl being handed back to her parents. Clearly, she should have remained in the hospital, but the doctors told the parents to take her home. We later learned that the child needed expensive treatment her family could not afford. When the parents took their daughter home, they knew she would die. One of many such cases, we were told. It was devastating. We felt miserable and feared that Naomi’s chances of survival were indeed slim.

At night, when the other parents had left, the waiting room would grow quiet. Around 10 pm, we too would leave, but stayed nearby until the lights were turned off. Then we returned to that room and remained there throughout the night. We wanted to stay as close as possible to Naomi, who lay in a small ICU room right next to the waiting room. Only a wall separated us.

We managed to do this for the first few nights, until one of the nurses asked us to leave. She suggested we stay at the small hotel for visiting medical staff, located right beside the hospital. It was the closest we could get, so that is what we did. Staying as late as possible in the hospital waiting room, then retreating to the hotel and returning early the next morning, became our daily routine.

Days of gloomy weather outside and severe anxiety inside crawled by as if there were no end. Every hour felt like an eternity. Then, one day, as I left the hotel and walked across the parking lot to the hospital, my phone rang. It was one of the ICU nurses. I froze. She happily told me that Naomi had opened her eyes! She explained that this was a good sign — evidence that Naomi was coming out of her coma. I was overjoyed.

Still standing in the middle of the parking lot, I breathed a sigh of relief, looked up, and was blinded by the sun, appearing from behind the parting clouds at that very moment. “Here comes the sun,” I thought. Then I ran as fast as I could to Paulina to share the good news.

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Next: The coincidences