By Richard Collins
I was going in for chemo. I brought my daughter Izzy with me but for some reason asked her to wait in the car. A nurse came to the waiting room and took me through several long halls to another building. We passed I don’t know how many doors, most were closed, some were swinging, few were labeled. I was worried Izzy wouldn’t be able to find me if she went inside to the waiting room, or that she would stay in the hot car. I was already thirty minutes late for my appointment, but by the time I got to the new location through the maze of the hospital’s various mystery clinics I was forty-five minutes late. I tried to call Izzy or her mother on my phone but it was busy updating its operating system. The doctor gently scolded me by saying, ‘you were already late, so don’t push your luck, we only give you two chances.’ I still kept looking at my phone in case it had finished its upgrade. I thought, ‘okay, chemo, here it is. The beginning of the end. It’s not so bad. It’s been a good life. I can go out calmly.’ No raging against the dying of the light for me, in fact I’ll help it along.
There were a lot of other patients waiting. There were gurneys lined up everywhere in the new waiting room, lots of patients milling about like me, some on their phones. Why not me? On a couple of gurneys were charcuterie boards full of half-eaten salami and cheeses, grapes and crudités. I thought this in bad taste. Some celebration, some kind of ward party? The doctor was cleaning all this up, as though he had just finished surgery or a meal. I said, “look, I’ve got to call my daughter, she’s waiting in a hot car, and I need to tell her to go inside or something.” He looked at me mock-sympathetically, held up two fingers, but did not give me permission to use the phone at the nurses’ station, so I continued to check my cell to see if it had unfrozen to continue its upgrade. The speed of the upload was not encouraging, choppy, some instability in the connection here maybe. I was about to tell him again, more assertively, that my daughter needed looking after, but then I remembered that she was not six years old but twenty-three and surely she could take care of herself and go inside if the car got too hot or she wondered where I was, here in the cancer clinic in mid-winter, when my name was called.
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Richard Collins is abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple and lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he leads Stone Nest Zen Dojo. His work has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and a Pushcart Prize and appears in Clockhouse, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, MockingHeart Review, Pensive, Sho Poetry Journal, Think, and Willows Wept Review. His books include No Fear Zen (Hohm Press), In Search of the Hermaphrodite: A Memoir (Tough Poets Press, 2024), and Stone Nest: Poems (Shanti Arts, 2025).