Why I keep going back
Why I keep going back
The first time I went to City Children's Hospital was the Mid-Autumn Festival of my eighth grade year. We brought mooncakes and gifts for the young patients. I thought it would be a one-time thing, hand everything out and go home. I had no idea I'd keep coming back to that place for the next three years.
There was a small stage that day. Older kids sang and danced, clowns handed out balloons, pinwheels, stuffed animals, bears, cats, all sorts of things. The whole room was children, every pair of eyes fixed on the stage. But I noticed something. Their hands were still gripping the gift they'd just been given, holding on tight, as if letting go meant losing it.
There was one boy. His head was bare, his hair all gone from the medicine. He danced to the music like it was the happiest moment of his life, and the whole time his hand stayed closed around a small round stuffed cat. He didn't let go of it once, the entire event. That was when I understood what that toy meant to him, and why he held it so tightly. He rarely got gifts.
I was fourteen that day. I walked out of the hospital and I couldn't forget that boy. I kept thinking about something no textbook had ever taught me: a palm-sized stuffed cat is cheap to one child and a whole treasure to another. The same little thing, weighing differently depending on how much the one holding it has gone without.
I think that's the reason I went back. Not because I felt I'd done anything big. I hadn't done anything big at all. I went back because that day I saw something, and once you've seen it, it's hard to pretend you didn't.
So I came again on the first of June, then again, and again. Some years I raised a few hundred Mid-Autumn gifts, some years a few hundred meals for the children staying for treatment. I don't mention those numbers so they'll be remembered. I mention them because behind every number is a face, and I know some of those kids were holding their gift just as tightly as that boy did.
This Mid-Autumn I'm preparing gifts again, for the children at that same hospital. The same thing I did back in eighth grade. With one difference I never saw coming at fourteen: the going-back isn't only mine to carry now. This past April, for the first time, I didn't come alone. A few friends from the club came with me, and together we raised a few hundred meals for the kids in treatment. It turned out the thing I'd been doing on my own for three years was something I could hand to others to carry too.
Sometimes I ask myself whether I'm just going in circles, the same handful of things every year. But I don't think it's a circle. Each time I go back I notice something I'd missed before, and the kid who walked into that hospital three years ago with a box of mooncakes isn't quite the same as the one who walks in now.
I still haven't done anything truly big for those children. I know that. But the boy with the stuffed cat taught me something I've carried ever since: a healthy heart isn't only one without illness, it's one that can still be moved by another. Maybe I keep going back just to keep my own heart from forgetting how to feel.
