Not so long ago in the ED, I was helping a patient in one of the acute care beds. Through the curtain that divided the room I was in from the next patient room, I heard someone reading out loud. Where the reading was coming from, a post-retirement man was the patient and his wife was with him.

I saw through a gap in the curtain that the wife was happily reading a book to her husband. Her voice rose and fell with the emphasis of someone who had read aloud many times. Her voice mixed with the sound of her husband’s snoring. When she stopped reading, he stopped snoring and became restless. Sometimes she paused and looked at him. She’d smile and then continue reading before he fully awoke.

The sleeping husband and reading wife seemed so content and peaceful despite being in the middle of the ED on a day when people around them were having their worst days. The husband could have been very sick too but, unlike many of our patients waiting to be seen, he wasn’t sitting alone staring into space as he waited.

That woman reading to her husband was the clearest example I’d seen of true love in months. We see a lot of couples and families come through the ED every day. Accompanying a sick loved one often brings out the caring side of people, however there was something about the calm, closeness of those two (sleeping and reading) that highlighted the strength of their connection. I was reminded, for the millionth time, that it’s the little things that add up to indomitable forces.