Something about going to the hospital and signing all those release forms puts me in a contemplative mood. Hardly anyone does die in hospitals these days from routine procedures, and I don’t fear my surgeries – they all seem to make me healthier and better.

But still, they are so worried in hospitals about surgery one can’t but take their worries seriously.

There must be something to asking people to put their signature to a paper that says they might die.

I always do some “what if” the night before. What if Maria and I never see one another again?

What if I go off to the hospital and never return to the farm. Or blog again? Or see the dogs? Or if I never take another photo? Life happens. Former journalists know this better than anyone.

It isn’t that I expect to die, it’s that the act of turning your very being over to strangers and putting your life and trust in their hands is always a great leap of faith.

And a time for humility.

The very idea that those lights could be the last thing you see – however much the odds are in your favor – is a profound thing to contemplate. Rolling into the operating room I thought of the many people in hospitals who are dying alone from the coronavirus, and I feel grateful, my heart breaks for them.

That moment – the split-second between consciousness and the void in an operating room – is a profound spiritual passage for me.

This is not how I normally think.

You know how it is with men. The only ones who are bearable have been tortured as adults or humiliated as children. Only pain and disappointment can open most of us up.

For a day or two after I get home from any surgery, I review my life a bit, past, present, and future. Surgery is sobering.

Christmas gets into my blood as well. As commercialized as Americans get about holidays, there is something to this one that reaches deep inside of me, there is the idea of redemption, love, family, and rebirth.

At Christmas, we often declare a truce with one another, we rediscover empathy and love. That’s the hope.

When I leave a hospital, I don’t think about the life that I might have lost, but the life that I have ahead of me to live.

I stand (or write) before you as a person who offers a small message of hope.

There are always people who dare to exist on the margins of society, who are not dependent on the acceptance of others, not dependent on social norms or social conventions,  religious dogma, or stuffy etiquette, and who prefer a kind of unanchored and unmoored existence in a perpetual state of risk and uncertainty.

If those brave people – I believe that includes many of you reading this, or you wouldn’t be reading this  – can remain faithful to their calling, their creative spark, their own choice of vocation,  then insight and communication and wisdom on the deepest level are possible.

My goal in life, my meaning, is to be one of those people. Sometimes I get close.

For this purpose, I have given rebirth to myself, resurrected my own dying life.

As I was wheeled into the operating room Monday for the third time this year, I looked up at all those people in black scrubs with serious masks and grim demeanor, and I was warned I was about to go to sleep.

I promised myself that if I woke up – this is when all is said and done, an exercise in faith and hope – I would commit myself once more to that kind of life.

This hope is beyond words and is beyond speech, and beyond definition.

I am married to such a person, I know they exist.

I like to think this faith and resolution exists inside of all of us, but I can’t say for sure, I am not that bright or all-knowing. I rarely meet people who talk about these things.

It is so simple in our world to react to life, rather than live it, to let other people define who we are and what we need, to stay strong in the face of cruelty, rage, and creed.

To everyone, but especially to those people who exist on the margins and risk being yourselves, I wish you the most meaningful of holidays, and my prayer for you is that you never give up hope for yourself, your work, your love,   and the promise of a kinder and gentler world.

That is my Christmas message.

You are my brothers and my sisters.

Merry Christmas.