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[An email from Bart Vincelette – Vancouver, British Columbia]
I’m just back from St. Paul’s Hospital where I had the last of a series of blood work done. I stopped at Palliative Care to say hi to my friend Harvey, the head of social work at the hospital. Outside the nursing station was a family with their 12 year old son, the kid all dressed up in a smart cowboy outfit. He’d apparently been getting ready for a rodeo being held in a few weeks in the suburbs of Vancouver. The kid was cute as a bug. He and his family stopped by so he could show off his new cowboy gear to his best friend who was in St. Paul’s for cancer treatment.
But when he and his family arrived he was told that his best buddy had just died. The poor kid totally fell apart, in tears with his hands covering his face. It was his first experience with death. Everyone, including the family of the boy who died, was trying to console him. Two police officers who happened to be on the ward learned what happened and they came over to offer their condolences to the little guy. To a kid, of course, cops are all-powerful. So, when he sees them he reaches out his hands and cries “can you save him, can you save him?” Well, then the cops were in tears. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. We were all in tears. Harvey, though, stepped up with his experience and compassion to comfort the little cowboy. A double tragedy at St. Paul’s – a young man lost his life and his friend faced death for the first time in his young life.
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