Not Guilty

Our daughter’s first day of Med School

ten years ago, computer charged, a career choice

nourished by frozen yogurt she inhaled

in the hospital café, her too-sick-for-school days

spent watching videos from a call room bed,

our spooky trips to the sub-basement morgue,

dinners that orbited depression, dialysis,

dengue fever, and death, our complaints

about administrators and managed care,

moments she witnessed the weight

of a doctor’s responsibility when we left

the table to answer a suffering patient’s call.

We never told her, “Become a doctor,”

but today at 5 pm we hear her last sign out

from training, a married mother who absorbed

her parents the way bodies soak up sugar and salt,

relieved to know she witnessed the arc and ache

of our lives in Medicine and judged us “Not guilty”

of crimes we committed in the name of healing.