A series of coincidences made me feel that someone from "above" had intervened to support us and lift us up when our world fell apart.
That brief moment in the parking lot turned out a to be the start of a long and challenging recovery journey. Our roller coaster ride continued in full force. The next few months we were simply passengers reacting to whatever happened next. Especially the four months in that apartment we rented were very tough. Late at night, when Naomi finally slept for a bit and we could sort of have a short rest, Paulina and I would try to process what had happened with Naomi. Would she ever recover? Whereas it hurt to think about the past when Naomi was that healthy, active little girl, thinking about the future was even more painful. We were just living in the present. We lived from hour to hour, from day to day. All the time we were busy taking care of Naomi. Every three hours we had to feed her. We prepared special milk, warmed it up and used a syringe to gently push it through the nasogastric tube into Naomi’s stomach. In between feeding, at various different hours, we had to carefully prepare and give Naomi her medicines. Caring for her completely preoccupied us. Although we asked ourselves many questions, we never got round to answering them.
It took about a year for Naomi to become more stable and for our lives to become more structured and routine. By the time we had settled into a new and proper home, it was easier for me to think. I often wondered why something this terrible happened with Naomi. Was there a reason? I thought about the meaning of life and wondered if there actually was a meaning, or if life was just a series of random events. What, still, was the meaning of Naomi’s life? That horrendous cardiac arrest had essentially taken her life away! Would she get it back at some point? It was tough having all these unanswered questions.
What bothered me was that however distraught we were, deep down I felt a calmness. That may sound nice but it actually made me feel really bad about myself as I did not understand how I could feel that way given all that Naomi had to go through.
On top of that, I gradually got the feeling that we, as Naomi’s parents, were somehow privileged to experience this tragedy. That did not make sense to me at all considering how much Naomi suffered. Did I just feel what I wanted to feel, perhaps? Was that even possible? Was I simply ignoring what the doctors had said about Naomi – that she would see little or no improvement at all – and was I trying to avoid the hard reality? Was I in denial? Was false hope building in me or was this awkward feeling of calmness actually justified? I tried to rationalise these feelings with the intend to get rid of them but instead of them fading away, they persisted, and I ultimately decided to let them be. Now that our world had turned upside down, I thought this was probably an appropriate time for me to make a bit of a change; to rethink the way I went about things. I resolved to go along with what felt right instead of only with what was logically right. Not that I chucked logic out of the window but after months of reasoning, I conceded that not everything could be explained by reason alone. Maybe certain things were simply beyond reason.
It began to grow on me that we were given an opportunity to learn something, to reflect on our lives and to make some sort of change. I felt Paulina and I also needed to look at ourselves in order to see Naomi recover but I had no clue what exactly we were supposed to learn or do. Should we have been more grateful for what we had? Had we been taking things for granted? Did we have the wrong priorities? Did I spend too much time working and too little time with my wife and daughters? Had we lost sight of what was truly important versus what was actually just "noise"? Were we heading in the wrong direction as parents, as husband and wife, as individuals?
It's All Right
In this storm of doubts, the one thing that felt weirdly certain was that "It's all right" message. Although I did not have any evidence that it was indeed a message, it stood out from everything else that was happening and I found myself repeatedly coming back to it. Whenever we worried about the future and were left without answers, in the end I would often think: “It’s all right. Naomi will be all right.” It bothered me that I could not explain this feeling but I appreciated the comfort it provided.
It was only when I finally accepted that "message" as an actual message, that I realised this meant there had to be a sender. No ordinary sender but evidently one with knowledge of the future. One who knew when Naomi would suffer that cardiac arrest. Obviously, the sender also knew that I would first remember and then forget about the song, and anticipating that, prepared a reminder in advance by inspiring Naomi to choose a book with a big bright sun on the cover. Maybe the sender even had a hand in me being gifted that MP3 player, which was why I thought of recording my voice in the first place and why I subsequently found that book.
For a moment I thought this actually made sense but then I quickly dismissed it all. Too far-fetched. Surely, my imagination was taking over. That, or I was trying to post-rationalise things. I reckoned the most rational explanation for this sequence of events was to consider it coincidence. I thought about this for a while and then concluded that was also the most lazy explanation. If all this was really just coincidence, then what I experienced had to be completely random and disconnected events, which seemed unreasonable to me. Reflecting on the first few months after Naomi's cardiac arrest, it occurred to me that in much the same way as how the sun's appearance coincided with Naomi opening her eyes, various other things had happened that I found hard to dismiss as mere coincidences, especially when viewing them as a series of events.
Phone Calls
One such coincidence relates to the vast number of phone calls Paulina and I used to receive from a host of real estate agents keen to sell our Shanghai apartment. This is hard to imagine for anyone not living in a big Chinese city but in China, real estate agents are incredibly persistent when it comes to pursuing what they believe are good opportunities for making a deal. They simply keep calling you. Ten calls a day was very common. They would call any time, including early morning, late at night and throughout the weekend. It was very annoying. We had never given our details to any of these agents but I guess someone working in the sales department of the property developer must have shared our phone numbers with them. Telling those agents not to call you was an ongoing but futile effort. They would persist calling despite us telling them that we did not want to sell our home. However, from the moment Naomi was hospitalised, we did not receive a single call from a single agent. It just stopped. Our phones were switched on day and night but no agent ever called us since. It was as if with a single swipe, someone had deleted our phone numbers from all those agents' contact lists and made it impossible for them to further harass us during this difficult time.
Private Doctor
Another coincidence occurred when we found it increasingly difficult to communicate with Naomi's doctors. Most of them did not speak English and those who could, had just limited vocabulary. As a result, we had no clue what was going on with Naomi. Even our Chinese friends, who could speak English very well, could not help us out because most of what the doctors were saying was very brief and full of medical jargon. We needed someone we felt comfortable with, who spoke both English and Chinese and who could quickly grasp what the doctors were saying. We needed an English speaking Chinese doctor.
On the other side of the world, one of our company's board members who had heard about our struggles, had spoken with a Dutch cardiologist based in Amsterdam and arranged for me to talk with him. When I spoke with him, I explained our situation and asked for advise. He told me a friend of his, Lisha, a Dutch-Chinese peadeatric doctor, happened to be working on a research project in Shanghai that month. He passed me her phone number and I gave her a call. She was very kind and although she worked in a hospital on the other side of town, she immediately offered to come over. From then on, she visited us every day. She spoke fluent Chinese so the doctors could brief her on Naomi's condition and then she would explain to me in Dutch. I could ask her whatever questions I had and she would talk with the relevant doctors to get the answers. Finally we understood what was going on with Naomi. Just like when the sun came to brighten up our days, this time round, Lisha came to take us out of the dark and into the light.
Moment of the Day
The next coincidence was that my company's finance director, Susan, who helped us with the hospital paperwork and bills, turned out to be friends with one of the head nurses. Susan happened upon her when she walked through the hallway nearby the ICU. She told her friend about our situation and asked if it was possible for us to see our daughter. This compassionate nurse then arranged for us to see Naomi. Every day, late at night, when the other parents had long left the hospital, she would open the doors to the ICU, give us surgical gowns and masks and let us into Naomi's room. This way we could briefly see and touch her. It became the one moment we looked forward to each day. At the same time, it was also the most terrifying moment of the day. To see Naomi lying motionless on her bed, unable to tell if she realised we were there, left us feeling scared and intensely sad.
Old Friend
Lisha was not the only Dutch person that just so happened to cross our path. The first few months after arriving in Singapore we primarily stayed in the hospital and slept in hotels. We would alternate on a daily basis: one night I would take Sienna to the hotel and Paulina would stay with Naomi in the hospital, the next night I would stay with Naomi and Paulina would take Sienna back to the hotel. Pretty much all the time we were with Naomi. Paulina, Sienna and I had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hospital's food court and we took turns to take Sienna, who was three years old at the time, to the hospital playground. The hospital had become our "home". Then one day I received a phone call from Jiska, an old friend from Beijing. We had not seen each other for over 10 years. It turned out she and her family lived in Singapore. Jiska was very caring and empathetic and offered to help out wherever possible. She took Sienna out for lunch or dinner, to parks and playgrounds and Sienna would spend days at their house playing in the garden with Jiska's daughters. It gave us the opportunity to take some time and find a place to live.
Befitting the continuing occurrence of such coincidences, it turned out that Jiska happened to have an active interest in child brain development. Over the years, she had learned a great deal about the subject and much of what she had studied was relevant to us. Keen to help, she shared various materials and information about alternative therapies the hospital would not talk to us about. Jiska gave us hope and supported our determination to help Naomi recover.
Business Partners
Last but not least, my two friends and business partners, Maarten and Olaf, with whom I owned and operated a company in China, were equally supportive and compassionate. They let me focus the majority of my time on my family whilst they looked after the business. Being self-employed with such great partners gave me the flexibility to work when and where I could and allowed me to retain my income and ability to finance our escalating monthly expenses. Especially after the insurance company voided Naomi's policy, I was grateful for having the means to pay the hospital bills ourselves.
A welcome coincidence was that it so happened to be that around the same time as we fled to Singapore, Maarten and his wife decided to relocate their family to Singapore as well. They had lived in China for 25 years so this was a big decision. I was glad to have Maarten nearby so I could easily talk with him whenever needed. He was with us in the hospital when Naomi underwent surgery and it felt great to have his support during this difficult time. Maarten also arranged the incorporation of our Singapore company so we could employ ourselves and obtain an employment pass and residency permit, which made it possible for our family to stay in Singapore long-term, move out of that serviced apartment, rent a proper home and enrol Sienna into a nearby school. We needed stability to rebuild our lives so it was good to gradually put all the basics back into place again.
Feeling Precedes Logic
Pondering all these coincidences, I got a strong sense that what we had experienced had somehow been facilitated. It felt as if someone in the background had intervened, introduced the right people at the right time and gently made things happen when and where necessary. I felt these "coincidences" had been carefully orchestrated, with some of them arranged on the spot and others having been years in the making, all with the foresight to support us and lift us up when our world fell apart.
With this notion, I returned to my earlier doubts about the "It's all right" message and realised that reason actually did support my feelings. I concluded that dismissing the idea of these lyrics being a message and therefore denying the existence of an intelligent sender, was – given all we had experienced – simply unreasonable. I had sufficient reason to stick with my initial feeling and to accept those first few lyrics were indeed a message, which then left me wondering about who the sender was.
Did God sent us this message? Was God the orchestrator of all these coincidences? Who was God? I had always believed that "somewhere out there" was something greater than us. Not that I had ever given that notion any serious thought but I believed in a greater being. If not God, could it have been an angel perhaps? Years ago I had heard that everyone has a guardian angel. I decided that whoever or whatever had send us this “It’s all right” message, it must have come from "above". Unfortunately, I did not have a clear understanding of what "above" actually meant or referred to and neither did I know how this "above" or otherwise those who might dwell there were perhaps able to communicate with us. So far, my quest for answers had only lead to more questions. As my mind was still preoccupied with looking after Naomi and getting our lives back on track, I had little time for contemplation and so my questions remained unanswered.
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