total.
The IV was my lifeline—my only lifeline. Strength began to ebb. The various tubes used to keep me drained were closely monitored. The IV could sustain life, but not strength, which was fading. My family was there, different members by turns. They needed to keep me moving, to get out of bed and walk, trailing my tubes, which were secured on a steel pole that I pushed along. But the effort was formidable.
My daughter Sylvia, especially, urged and insisted that I make it out of the room and down the corridor. When she let me stop and turn back, I saw the door to my room. It looked far away, at an impossible distance. How could I get to it? How could I finally just get on my bed again?
Dr. Weiss came to see me, almost four weeks after the surgery. The surgical team had concluded that another operation was necessary. Was I willing?
“Yes, yes. Let’s do it.” I was ready for some action, any action, to make progress.
That was how, in a late night of that second recuperation, my spirit turned hopeful again. There would be years, yet. And if I had the time, I would write.
It was a prayer to my God. I wasn’t asking for a bargain, a quid pro quo: do this for me, and I will do that for You. It was just that I began to feel that there were thoughts and ideas that I needed to put into words—books, even, that I needed to work at writing.
“If I can have fifteen years,” I thought “I’ll use them to write.”
That second surgery cleared the blockage. I was able to eat. Strength began to return, and after the expected two weeks—making mine a total of forty-four days in the hospital—I went home, carefully. I still trailed two of my tubes, and had a wide, deep incision that needed to be monitored and dressed by a visiting nurse, while it healed from the inside out.
But in time the first book took shape. I had begun it as a long narrative poem, an imaginative telling of how the beautiful New Testament Gospel of Luke came to be written. I recast it and rounded it out, in prose, giving it the title I, Lukas, Wrote the Book.
Now I have had, by God’s transcendent grace, not fifteen but twenty years of good health, and eight books have been published. This is my ninth.
1
“Look to the Rock”
Look to the rock from which you were hewn,
And to the quarry from which you were dug
(Isaiah 51:1 NRSV)
So counsels the prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures. The rock from which I was hewn was the staunch and spare tradition of Scottish Presbyterian faith, as exemplified by my dad, Archibald G. Fletcher, MD, and, in softer form, my mother, Jessie Rodgers Fletcher. Arch Fletcher’s forebears had migrated, several generations earlier, from Scotland to Canada; those of Jessie Rodgers, from Scottish Northern Ireland to Philadelphia. Now these two young people, coming from very different settings, had enlisted individually with the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and had been sent to Korea.
This was in the second decade of the 1900s. Japan had annexed Korea, as the ancient Korean kingdom collapsed; but in terms of Christian mission enterprise, the people of Korea were proving to be remarkably ready and responsive, and Japan remained open to and accepting of Western influence.
Arch and Jessie, both in their late twenties, were part of a thrust of recruits eager to learn the language and customs and to adapt to the needs of the Korean people. After several years, they found themselves together in Taegu (also spelled Daegu), a provincial capital in the warm southern part of the Korean Peninsula. Arch, a Canadian farm boy from Ontario, was assigned to the medical work in Taegu, while Jessie, a Philadelphia girl, was there provisionally, helping with a large gathering of Korean women.
Different though they were, Jessie and Arch quickly found that they enjoyed one another’s company. It was spring, and several bewitching May evenings were enough for a very brief courtship. They each knew who they were, and now knew that they were in love. The proper mission and civil authorities were consulted, and within a short time they were married.
The major social adjustment fell to Jessie. She was now the doctor’s wife, making a home just up the hill from the hospital, such as it was. And very soon she was pregnant. Baby Elsie, my sister, arrived the following May, and a year later, in August of 1917, my brother, Archie (Arch Jr.). My appearance came in January of 1919, but not in Taegu. That is another story.
*****
“Dr. Adams, please, come quickly. Arch needs you.”
The Rev. Dr. James Adams, veteran senior missionary, lived next door to the doctor’s house. He had wakened to a timid but urgent knocking on his bedroom window. When he got it open, he made out the figure below, just recognizable in the first glimmer of daylight.
“Why, Jessie, is that you?”
“Yes, yes! Please hurry!”
Dr. Adams found his shoes and a wrap against the chill of late winter. As he and Jessie crossed to her house, she told him, in brief snatches, what had happened. Arch had been working all day—seeing outpatients through the morning and performing one surgery after another in an afternoon that stretched into evening. He got home too exhausted to eat dinner; just fell in to bed. Now, only a short while ago, he woke her.
“Get me a basin, quick!”
When she brought it, he coughed up a torrent of bright red blood. At first, she didn’t dare leave him; but she had to have help.
The basin was still there; the blood darker now.
“Yes, Jessie, you did the right thing.”
Taking charge, Dr. Adams, first thing in the morning had a telegram sent to the main mission hospital in Seoul. Arch’s father and his eldest brother had both died of tuberculosis. The significance of the pulmonary hemorrhage was clear. He dared not make even a modest exertion, while the family packed for the earliest passage available across the Pacific to the United States.
Arch had to watch helplessly, while Jessie shouldered the whole burden of preparing to leave, with no assurance that they would ever return. There was no treatment, yet, for tuberculosis. The “cure” was rest, with plenty of fresh air. When the family was back, finally, in the eastern US, Arch would be spending long months in a sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, while Jessie and the children lived with her parents just outside of Philadelphia.
It was a stressful time, more so because Jessie was pregnant again. How vast was her relief when Arch wrote, in October, that he was soon to be released from the sanitarium. The Pennsylvania Medical Missionary Society had several cottages, on the Jersey shore, in the town of Ventnor, and he had secured the use of one of them for the family.
To Jessie it seemed dream-like to stand in front of that white clapboard, two-story cottage in the late October sunlight, with Arch beside her, looking quite fit now, holding toddler Archie by the hand, while Elsie ran ahead excitedly to try the door. This would be home—their first family home in the United States.
The cottage had a screened porch on the second floor, where Arch, obedient to his “cure,” could sleep in the fresh air. It was certainly fresh on that cold night of January 6, 1919, but Arch was not sleeping. In a second-floor bedroom, lights were burning past midnight.
