The Seats They Took at Graduation
The Ring and the Promise
People sometimes ask why I chose nursing instead of anything else, as if the answer is complicated. It is not. I spent five years of my childhood being the patient nobody in my family wanted to sit with, until one woman showed up on a night shift and sat with me anyway. I wanted, for the rest of my working life, to be the person who walks into that kind of room on purpose.
I wore Virginia’s ring through anatomy, through my first cadaver lab, through the clinical rotation on the pediatric oncology floor at a regional hospital an hour from campus, where I met a seven year old named Lawrence who reminded me so completely of myself at that age, minus the mother who never once came, that I had to step into the supply closet and cry for exactly ninety seconds before I could go back in and finish his blood pressure check with a steady hand.
Lawrence’s mother slept in the recliner beside his bed every single night of his admission. I watched her do it for six straight weeks of my rotation, and every time I watched her, I thought of Virginia’s chair pulled close instead of standing over me, and I understood, more completely each time, exactly what kind of nurse I intended to become.
My college roommate, Julia, used to tease me that I picked the hardest floor in the hospital to fall in love with on purpose. She was probably right. I have never once regretted it.
Wabash Valley State
Wabash Valley State is not a school that puts its name on national rankings lists. It is a good, solid, unglamorous state university an hour and a half from Bethel Springs, the kind of place where half the nursing cohort commutes from farm towns like mine and nobody there had ever heard of the Kessler family or any scrapbook full of somebody else’s box scores. I liked it precisely because nobody already had an opinion of me.
I made the dean’s list every semester. I picked up extra clinical hours at the regional hospital on weekends, in part because I needed the experience and in part, if I am honest, because a busy weekend meant fewer quiet hours where I might otherwise wonder whether my parents ever thought about me at all.
They did not reach out. Not once, not for four years of college, not for a single birthday, not even the year I posted my first day of clinicals on a social media account I kept mostly for Virginia and the church prayer circle to follow. Nick liked exactly one photo from that account in four years, a picture of me in scrubs standing outside Riley Hospital during a volunteer shift, and then said nothing else for another two years after that.
I did not spend those years angry, or at least not angry in the way people expect. Bethel Springs Community Church raised me on a particular kind of faith, the kind that does not ask you to pretend a wound never happened, only that you decide, eventually, what you are going to let it turn you into. Virginia modeled that decision for me every single day of my life with her, without ever once preaching it at me. I decided, somewhere around my junior year, that I was not going to let the Kessler side of my family cost me my capacity for grace, even if they had already cost me plenty else.
That decision got tested the spring of my senior year, four months before graduation, when my phone lit up with a text from a number I had deleted years earlier and somehow still recognized on sight.