What’s Yours Will Never Pass You

“What’s yours will never pass you,” he whispered in a thick Scottish accent.

My back was turned to him as I started walking out of his hospital room. His quiet words stopped me mid-step as if a force field had captured me in his deep thoughts.

He was isolated in a private room for the third day. There was a Covid outbreak on his ward, and though he remained Covid-negative, he had been exposed to the virus. Hospital policy was to keep Covid-exposed patients isolated with no opportunity for visitors. 

Moments before we had finished reviewing the reasons he was admitted to the hospital, ensured improvement, and made a plan for potential discharge pending further normalization in his blood work and symptoms. He would almost certainly be able to go home within the next few days.

But this was not soon enough for him.

You see, for this man in his late sixties, that particular Saturday was a special day. It was his wedding anniversary. He and his bride were married forty-five years ago that day. The look of nostalgia in his blue-grey eyes and the absolute love with which he spoke of his wife brought a smile to my masked face.

During our visit he had already shared with me that his lifetime love was sitting at home while he sat in the hospital. Today was to be the only wedding anniversary the two of them spent apart, he explained. He was very sad about this. He told me his sadness was especially highlighted because he knew this was his last wedding anniversary. Death was coming for him. He knew he would not make another year to celebrate anniversary number forty-six. On his last wedding anniversary on this earth, he and his wife were forced to be apart. His sadness fell as silent tears from his eyes, caught by his mask, while he told me this.

He had also admitted he was scared to die alone in this room – a vulnerable admission, even while in a cancer hospital. I tried to alleviate some worry by telling him his death, though expected within more than a handful of months, was not likely to be over the next few weeks. I was fairly confident we would be getting him home alive. He had more time.

I turned to leave after that, thinking our exchange had ended. But as I started walking out of the room I heard him whisper, “What’s yours will never pass you.”

My ears perked up. I turned back toward him and asked him to repeat himself. He did.

“What’s your will never pass you.”

I told him I did not understand the meaning behind those words. I asked him what that sentence meant to him.

He stood up from his chair and explained his Granny shared these words with him many years ago. “She repeated them often,” he said. He stated, “Granny used this sentence to capture all that was important in life.”

While I listened, he went on to say these words mean everything. That’s what he said: “It means everything!”

It is the reason his wife and him have been together for so long. It is also the reason he will die. To this man, in those moments, “what’s yours will never pass you” meant LOVE and DEATH. Love did not pass him and death would not either.

When I turned to leave the room for the second time he asked me loudly to pass it on. Isn’t that something?!

He told me his Granny always told him to pass this saying on. “Today seemed like a good day to do that,” he chuckled. And so he did. He passed it on to me in a beautiful moment on the fourth floor of our cancer hospital on his forty-fifth wedding anniversary.

I’ve reflected upon this statement many times over the months since I first learned it. I have shared it with a few close friends and explored what it means – to them, to me. My understanding of it changes ever so slightly each time it pops to mind.

My current thinking and what I would like to believe is that “what’s yours will never pass you” does mean everything: that all the things that happens over the course of our lives — love, pain, loss, joy, frustration, disappointment, exhilaration, you name it — never leave us. These are our experiences, our feelings, and they are all part of what makes us individual. We can remember past moments and the feelings they evoked. If we are lucky, we might learn to accept things that happened to us, or be grateful that they did. We may or may not be able to recognize we can’t change the past, but the past happened nonetheless. Ultimately, our here and nows are made up of all that occurred in our lives before the moments of today. What’s yours will never pass you.

I love this man’s message of embracing the entirety of our lives. The pain and disappointments we experience may be as impactful as the joy and love that we find, or that finds us. Accepting ourselves and all of the building blocks of life and circumstance and emotion that have lead us to our current stepping stone is the human experience.

I will never forget “what’s yours will never pass you” from this patient and his Granny.

I would be interested in knowing what this saying means to you . . . .

Special notes:

I chose to share this patient encounter as my first in this blog in part because it impressed so strongly upon me how impactful passing on a piece of one’s self means to my patients. To leave a gentle footprint, in some way or to somebody, is rooted deeply within many of the people I see. I think this is a beautifully human thing to want to do – to connect with another and share pieces of ourselves. This story illustrates exactly what I hope to do with this blog: pass it on.

Also, through this first story, I would like to thank and acknowledge my best friend. I have a lot of feelings about my work and the patients that I serve. It is very hard for many of us in this field – whether doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, or support staff – to talk about the feelings that our jobs leave us with. It takes a very special person to encourage the sharing of these feelings and to create a safe space for that sharing to occur. My ability to share my feelings with my person about some of the hard stuff I feel from my work allows me to pass my feelings on in a healing way. It is with this support and encouragement that I have the courage to share the stories that will appear in my writing here.