Thelma Zirkelbach describes her memoir as “a story of love and loss and unexpected courage.” In the following excerpt from Chapter 11 of Stumbling Through the Dark, Mazo Publishers, 2013 (posted here with permission of the author), Thelma’s husband Ralph is undergoing a red cell transplant. How does one commemorate what is supposed to be a new birthday when at a hospital it all seems like business as usual?

March 9, Day Zero. The day of the transplant. Ralph’s new birthday, Dr. Helm called it. I called it terrifying. We stood on a precipice, and today we’d make the leap into space. I’m a clinger, not a leaper, and all I could think was, Where will we land?

Amazing that the day I’d longed for and dreaded started no differently from any other. For the first time, I spent the night at the hospital. I woke in the morning to see a nurse checking Ralph’s vital signs. Ralph chatted with her calmly.

I was calm, too. On the outside.

I wished him a Happy New Birthday and gave him a card that said, “Today is a gift, waiting to be opened.” I signed it, “With love and hope, Thelma.”

Then I went to the cafeteria for my first Franklin Cancer Institute breakfast. I spied an omelet station. What a surprise. Just like brunch in a fancy restaurant.

I ordered a cheese and mushroom omelet, hash browns and a biscuit. Second surprise: Cancer Institute cooks were capable of ruining an omelet, making it taste like it was a week old. How hard could it be, I wondered, to scramble eggs? Or maybe my fear made everything tasteless.

Back upstairs, we waited. In a hospital you get used to it. I kept glancing up at Ralph, wanting to say something memorable, but no words came.

Finally the nurse practitioner, a stocky man in a white coat, arrived, bearing a small plastic bag of what looked like ordinary red blood cells. He connected it to Ralph’s catheter line and stayed to monitor Ralph’s vital signs.

The blood dripped through the line and into Ralph’s body, like a regular transfusion. No sounds, no smells, only the steady drip, drip, drip into the plastic tube. Shouldn’t there be a drum roll or the blast of a trumpet?

Something should mark this IV as different, I thought. The blood should be redder, the rate of infusion faster. Or slower. I couldn’t take my eyes off small bag that held such hope. I watched the cells trickle until, after thirty minutes, none were left.

The nurse disconnected the bag and left the room. That was all. The most important moments of Ralph’s life — and mine were over.

A knock on the door startled us. “Come in,” I called, expecting a doctor or a nurse.

Instead, Lisa Bronstein, the tall, dark-haired Jewish chaplain who became a good friend to Ralph during his stay in isolation stepped into the room. “I see you’ve finished your transplant,” she said. “This is a significant occasion. I’m going to do a ceremony.”

Carrying a shofar, she walked to Ralph’s bedside. Old Testament readers will remember that on Mount Moriah God sent a ram to Abraham to sacrifice in place of Isaac, his son. The shofar is a ram’s horn that is blown on the most solemn days of the Jewish year: Rosh Hashanah, the New Year; and at the end of the service on the Day of Atonement. The slender, curved horn has an unearthly sound that speaks to the Jewish soul. Its long, piercing cry connects us to our people and our God. Here at last was our trumpet.

Lisa said a prayer, blew three blasts on the shofar, and together we read another prayer:

O Merciful One, open the gates of Your
wondrous storehouse, releasing your sparkling dew.
Droplets of dew, come for a blessing,
not a curse;
Come for life and not for death.
Come gently, filling with peace
the reservoir of my soul.

Comparing blood to dew made it sound delicate. I wanted the cells that dripped into Ralph’s body to be stronger, like warriors that would build battlements around his organs, defend his body. Still, I bowed my head,  shut my eyes, and prayed in my heart of hearts that the words of the prayer would be true, that life, not death would come from this.

Do prayers work? I hoped so.

In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner suggests during illness or loss, one should pray for courage to face what must be faced, so that is what I did.

I never viewed myself as courageous, but thinking back, I realize I had made progress. I didn’t fear being alone at night, nor did I feel afraid when leaving the hospital in the dark. My cousin asked me once if I was frightened walking through the shadowy, cavernous parking garage across the street from the hospital. “No,” I said, “not at all.” This was true, although the garage was often deserted at the time I left, usually long after the night shift staff who parked there came on and the day shift departed. I never saw a security guard at the garage entrance, nor did the lack of one bother me…

…The first hundred days are so crucial for a transplant patient that everyone, nurses and doctors included, knows what “day” a patient is on. I decided to give Ralph a method for counting his days. I bought two jars and a package of bright-colored peanut M & Ms. A hundred candies went into one jar, and each day I transferred one to the second jar. I liked shutting my eyes, grabbing an M & M and seeing what bright color I’d gotten. I liked the satisfying plunk when it landed in the empty jar. Ralph was not feeling well enough to be interested but I was certain he would be when he got better.

When I mentioned the jars to another patient’s wife, she gaped at me as if 1’d landed from another planet. “What made you think of that?” she asked.

“I work with kids,” I explained.

“Oh,” she said but she clearly didn’t get it.

I covered Ralph’s hospital room wall with snapshots of us, of his Iowa family, of trips we’d taken, of our children and two grandchildren, and of his cat Tiki. There we were in our parkas, standing on the deck of the Marco Polo cruise ship as we sailed to the Antarctic Peninsula, there laughing at a family gathering, there in a field of Texas bluebonnets.

March and April mark the height of bluebonnet season in central Texas. If he’d been well, this would be the time for our wildflower safari. Every spring we took a day trip, traveling west along Interstate 10, searching for bluebonnets. Our route was all freeway at first, then just past Columbus we would make a right onto State Highway 71, which meanders from there to Austin along the Bluebonnet Trail.

The bluebonnet, Latin name lupinus texensis, is the Texas state flower. I don’t know how residents of other states feel about their flowers, but the sight of bluebonnets turns a Texan’s heart to mush. I remember being on a tour bus in Peru when someone spied mountain lupines and yelled, “Bluebonnets!” and the bus full of delighted Texans broke into applause.

On our yearly trips, we sped through the countryside, eyes scanning the fields ahead of us. Red-orange Indian paintbrush, pale pink primroses, delicate purple phlox, spiderwort – they were beautiful but they were not what we were searching for.

Suddenly we would see a field. No, a lake, an ocean of blue.

A blue so bright, so intense, so perfect it could exist nowhere but Texas. A blue so lovely it put the sky to shame.

We would pull to the side of the road and park to savor the view. Ahead of us families spilled from cars. The children ran helter-skelter into the flowers and frolicked like puppies while the father recorded the scene for posterity.

Our own cameras clicked. We took panoramic shots of the brilliant blue blossoms against the verdant meadow grass. My favorite scene, tacked to the wall in Ralph’s hospital room, looked across the sea of blue to a barbed wire fence, where a lone mesquite tree laced in spring green raised twisted branches toward the cloudless sky. Behind the fence a couple of brown Santa Gertrudis cows grazed. A black and white border collie lazed in the sunshine.

On our trips, I always snapped a close-up photograph, though I had dozens in my album. I bent toward the tiny plants, each petal shaped like a sunbonnet, hence the name bluebonnet. Their stalks are thick, bright green. Like the inhabitants of their home state, they are sturdy and strong, straight and proud.