Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
We weren’t the kind of people who went to the doctor much, but a number of relatives at Thanksgiving dinner had told my parents that cough of mine was really bad. So, the following Monday, Mom and I went to see Dr. Brzica. Double pneumonia, he pronounced almost immediately, and ordered her to get me to the hospital 
ASAP. We stopped home first to get some clothes and my security blanket.
I was five years old. I had never been away from at least one parent overnight. Kindergarten was three blocks from our house, and my mother walked me there and came to walk me home every day.
Hospitals were different in the 1960s, even Catholic hospitals. I could have one visitor at a time for one hour each day. My recollection is that the black-habited sisters who were my nurses were less than patient with a child who didn’t sleep much due to diminished lung capacity and homesickness. One of them took away my security blanket.
You have to have sympathy for the apostles. Jesus’s messages were seldom easy to digest; after all, that was why He told them stories, to help them understand. But the night of the Last Supper, change was in the air, and it didn’t feel like good change. Judas had left. Their heads may have still been reeling at the thought of Peter denying Jesus three times. Now, Jesus was talking about going away and coming back. And this was all supposed to make them feel not only happy, but secure?
He went away in a gruesome, public way. Then He came back, just like He promised.
The sisters never returned my security blanket. It took me decades to figure out as the apostles did that true security isn’t found in people or blankets but in belief. When we have that, we are never alone.
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