ROOM NUMBER FIVE
It was October 4, 1960... a typical Jamaican autumn morning for most of the people around me. But for me, it was more than just a beautiful day. It was special beyond words. It was the morning when Norma would give birth to our first child by cesarean section.
I sat on the long, narrow verandah of the maternity ward of the natal hospital in Cross Roads, St. Andrew, just north of Kingston, Jamaica. In front of me were the hospital gardens. The June rosebushes (crepe myrtles) stood high and flowerless, as though remembering the better days of spring and summer. A sprawling Poinciana tree kept vigil over the overgrown lawn, along with various weeds that seemed to have taken over.
As I gazed skyward, I could see the clear blue sky dotted with soft, floating clouds.
All seemed so serene and peaceful, so full of innocent anticipation. Behind me was the open door to room number five. I looked in and saw all of Norma’s belongings, just as they were the night before. Just as when I left her twelve hours earlier. There was her Bible and the ever-present Scrabble set on which we played before I left for that long, lonely night at home.
By that time, it was just a few minutes past 9:00 AM., and Norma had been gone for about one hour. For a few brief moments, I reflected on the events of the night before. I remembered how, as I was leaving to go home, she beckoned for me to come back and kiss her one more time. She reminded me that she had thoroughly beaten me in the Scrabble game we played that night. Then, with tears in my eyes and hers, I said good night and promised to be there bright and early next morning to see our newborn baby. In those days, there were no Sonar 2 pictures to tell the gender of the baby, so we would wait for our surprise.
The time had come. I was there, awaiting the good news, but Norma had still not returned to room number five. Suddenly, a sullen, anxious feeling swept over me. A frightening thought came into my mind. What if Norma never comes back to room number five?
Quickly, I dismissed the frightening thought. Everything is all right, I tried to tell myself. Norma will soon be back with our little bundle of life.
I began thinking of Norma’s reassuring words to me that it would take about twenty minutes plus prep and post-op. And she should know, I thought. She was an operating room nurse and had taken part in this kind of operation. The frightening thought of her not coming back to room number five began to haunt me. I just could not shake it.
I sprang to my feet and walked nervously to the office of the hospital’s head nurse, Sister Sarah. I did my best to appear calm and controlled, but I was rattling on the inside as I approached her. “Aren’t things taking a rather long time, Sister?” I asked. “Well,” she responded, “news has come that the baby has been born, Mr. McLean, but sometimes it does take a little while to complete the suturing. I’ll go see how things are coming. You just wait here.” I waited. It seemed like hours had passed, although I knew it could have been only several minutes. Then Sister Sarah returned. “I think things aren’t going too well, Mr. McLean, and Dr. Parbosingh wants to talk with you.”
I immediately felt like I had been plunged into death and darkness and quickly shocked back into reality before I began to walk across the lawn towards the operating room. My steps were swift and my heart pounding with fear and great anxiety. I tried to reach for hope but the shelf seemed empty.
Then came a scene which is still etched in my memory. To say I was frightened, shocked, is putting it lightly. Before I had reached very far into my walk toward the building that housed the operating room, I saw Dr. Parboosingh emerging from the building and walking toward me. He was dressed in full surgical garb, with blood splattered apron. My heart sank even more deeply. Instinctively, I knew whose blood it was.
As we approached each other and stopped outside the building, my eyes read the countenance of Dr. Parboosingh, a frightened, terrified man. He began to speak: “Mr. McLean, the operation was successful, then when we were sewing her up, your wife stopped breathing, but we are still trying.” Somehow, by the grace of God, I managed to remain on my feet and I asked him, “How long has it been since she stopped breathing?” He replied, “About a half an hour.”
“Then you mean she is dead, don’t you?” “Well, we are still trying,” he replied.
It was hopeless now. He knew that. I knew that. Norma would never return to room number five.
I tried to be brave. I asked if I might see her body, my chest pounding, my heart about to burst. The nurses tried to restrain me from entering the operating room, but there was no earthly force strong enough to hinder me. I walked into the operating room and gazed at the still frame of the great and beautiful woman I loved. But before I could reach close enough to kiss those lovely lips I had kissed 3
the night before, those lips which just over twelve hours earlier had formed the words, “Remember, Audley, whatever happens, I love you,” something within me gave out, and my pent-up emotions exploded into a Niagara of tears and uncontrolled sobs.
I did not make it over to the operating table where the lifeless body of my darling Norma lay. The nurses led me back outside the room where, for several minutes, I just sat there and wept. Thoughts rushed through my mind like a freight train racing through. Reality was sinking in. She was really gone.
I must be honest. My first thoughts were not that Norma was now with her Lord, whom she loved and faithfully served. I only knew my Norma was not here. She would not be going home with me. She would not be bringing home our baby. The bedroom suite we had designed and crafted by the best custom furniture maker we could find would not be home to Norma and our baby.
At those moments, all I knew was that the baby was alive. I had not heard whether I had a girl or a boy. I learned later it was a darling girl. Norma and I had decided that if we had a girl, she would be Ruth and would have Norma’s middle name, Constance. If we had a boy, he would be named Timothy Audley. But still, I had not been able to see baby Ruth, who was placed in an incubator. It was hours before I was able to see her tiny frame. I could not hold her. With the congenital condition called an omphalocele, her abdominal wall was wide open and her intestines and other organs were hanging out I was told. That just magnified my trauma.
Before I had time to focus on my loss, I was introduced to Dr. Henry Shaw, a noted Surgeon and asked to sign permission documents, for him to perform life saving surgery on my four-hour-old baby. Although Ruth was over full term, my newborn daughter weighed only just over four pounds. That was the first of what
turned out to be several surgical procedures over the next several years, the final one being when she was eight years old.
Ruth not only survived but is now a healthy adult with a grown daughter of her own. Thanks be to God.
As I reflect upon the very first set of feelings I had, I admit that in addition to grief, there was a sense of anger. Over sixty years later, I’m still not able to tell you exactly what it felt like. All I can tell you is that I had a deep, hollow, hurting feeling. I felt I had been robbed. But that was not the whole story, nor was it the true picture. The real story was that the Lord of heaven and earth had seen fit to take His Norma home to be with Him. That notwithstanding, I still asked the unanswerable question. ‘Why me, Lord?”
Norma Constance Wilmot was born on March 5, 1933. At the age of thirteen, she trusted God for salvation and became a true disciple of Christ. She followed Him forever after.
My relationship with Norma began in the late nineteen-forties, while we were both teenagers and pupils in Sunday School at Galilee Gospel Hall in Kingston Jamaica. Norma caught my attention during her senior year at Merle Grove High School. I was one of a group of teenage boys who were seriously committed to Christian discipleship but not so committed that we did not have our eyes and ears open to the most attractive girls in our lane. Norma fitted that qualification. She was however, not just attractive. She was intriguing, quietly brilliant.
In those days, none of us owned an automobile. That meant we rode our bicycles, took the bus or walked everywhere. Her love for poetry and elocution made her increasingly attractive to me. But I was not sure the attraction was mutual.
Even so, I began by offering to walk her home from church. Eventually, I made it that far. Nothing concrete developed but I began to feel there was a chance for me.
Soon after Norma soon graduated from High School and started her first job as a government clerk, I left Jamaica for Bible College in Canada. She soon after that entered Nursing School at the University of the West Indies. We exchanged letters during my almost four years abroad but it took several months after my return to Jamaica for me to feel I had made significant progress in pursuit of Norma’s
attention. It began to become clear in our little circle that this relationship was developing and beginning to blossom. In late 1956 I proposed and she accepted. On July 6, 1957, a year after she graduated from The School of Nursing at the University of the West Indies, we were married..
We wanted a baby but Norma miscarried three times in the first two years. Only during the cesarean operation did the Doctor realize that her uterus was malformed and would never be able to deliver a baby. Norma suffered from a congenital malformation that restricted the space in which the baby should have developed.
Eventually, she did not miscarry but suffered severe pain during her pregnancy.
On October 4, 1960, she brought our darling daughter, Ruth Constance, into the world, and she moved on up to the home she frequently spoke about, sang about, and wrote about. For thirty-nine wonderful months, I lived and loved with this extraordinary human being. [Margarita1.1]She had learned to live with eternity’s values in view. Norma taught me how to sense the reality of heaven. She had often expressed her feeling that she would make the journey before I would. She did.
As I reflect upon my time with Norma, I think of the multi-faceted person she was. Lover, poet, passionate Christian witness, skilled nurse and then this next activity will address the breadth of her imagination and the reach of her aspirations.
After we had been married for a couple of years, I as an insurance salesman, would often travel to find clients out in distant parishes and often return late at night or be gone for long hours and she, with her shifting hours of duty, would make us almost miss each other for whole days. One day, as we sat at breakfast, Norma said to me: Darling, our different careers is almost keeping us apart too much. Norma proposed we turn our big backyard into a vegetable garden and chicken raising area. Before long, we started a large garden and she contacted the
small farmer’s department at the department of agriculture at Hope Gardens and had them visit out place, test the soil, etc. And off we went into small farming and selling our produce to local stores and to individuals who came by to purchase eggs and vegetables.
We had a large backyard and our neighbor’s backyard was similarly large. One evening when I came home from work, Norma invited me to go to the backyard. To my surprise and amazement, I saw that the mesh wire fence that separated our property from the neighbor’s was not there. Norma had negotiated with our neighbors to allow us to cultivate their backyard as our own. In exchange, they could help themselves to as much produce as their family needed. (Sharecropping, I guess).
Here’s a bird’s eye view of the multi-faceted person Norma was: In addition to wanting to be a mother, for which role she was so thoroughly suited, she was a nurse and entrepreneurial farmer and the other thing about which she was truly passionate was that she wanted to write, and she did. But Norma didn’t want to write just anything. She wrote about something that would touch the lives of young people for Christ. Norma’s writing days are over, but in a very real sense, her life was a book that remains written in the hearts and minds of those with whom she interacted.
Norma lived out her passion in our home. She undertook the task of editing and publishing the monthly Galilee Young People’s Group newsletter/magazine. Our living room became the headquarters for printing and publishing the monthly magazine. She corralled the young men of our church to come over and crank the handle of the old Gestetner copy machine and staple the pages together, punctuated by breaks to enjoy her homemade cookies and tea until all eighty five copies were done. That sometimes lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
I want to pass on the inspiration she left behind. That is why, on this sixty-third anniversary of her home-call, I am sharing this story with you. Perhaps just one person reading this will hear the Master’s call.
You may be that one person. May God help you to surrender your life to Christ, receive His everlasting life, and begin to share His good news.
“Now, on to broader fields of holy vision; on to loftier heights of faith and love. Onward, upward, apprehending wholly, all for which He calls you from above.” (Unknown)
October 4, 2023