AND DO YOU HAVE ANY CHILDREN? |
Aidan Kunju
“And do you have any children?”
A fleeting silence followed.
“Well, you know.” He pressed his lips together, shifting in his chair. “I thought I had a daughter.”
He thought?
Mr. Rivers held his cane between his legs, rocking it gently side to side. His plaid shirt was tucked into khaki pants, carefully ironed but streaked with dried mud at the cuffs, as if he had walked across wet ground before arriving at the clinic. A bucket hat sat low on his head, shading his eyes, which seemed to hover between the present moment and some distant memory.
At seventy-six, Mr. Rivers was a patient who reminded me that age threads complexity into every medical history. Some stories just didn’t fit into the neat little checkboxes in the electronic medical record. He looked at me as if waiting for permission to continue. I lowered my laptop screen and turned to face him more directly. Sometimes, I’d learned, the data gatherer must become a witness.
“Tell me more.”
A few weeks earlier, his daughter, Angela, had called him in tears. “Her momma told her I’m not her real father,” he said evenly. “Angela was crying, saying, ‘Daddy, we need to get a test.’ After all these years.”
His eyes dropped further into the shadow of his hat.
I hesitated, unsure of how much he wanted to share. “That must have been very difficult,” I said softly. “And that’s how you found out, too?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He rubbed his palms against his knees. Angela had called again three days later, telling him she no longer wanted to take a paternity test. She said it would not change anything, that he was still her father, one way or the other.
“But I suspect…” He tilted his head toward the ceiling. “I suspect she already took the test. With her real father. And based on that, she decided it was better not to tell me. For my own sake.”
Angela was almost fifty now. Her mother and Mr. Rivers had divorced when she was four. He never remarried. The war had left deep scars on his conscience, and for years, fatherhood felt like an impossible task when he could barely hold himself together. In those early years, he admitted, he was absent from his family’s life. “But I never missed one child support payment,” he told me. And when Angela turned eighteen and those payments stopped, he stepped back into her life, helping with her college tuition. He said it was his way of repairing what he could, of making amends for once leaving her.
“But,” he said finally, “it was all just a lie.”
For the first time, I saw a flicker of anguish ripple across his otherwise stoic face. For more than half his life, he had believed himself to be Angela’s father. An imperfect one, yes, but a father who had tried to do better.
He leaned forward slightly. “The other man is from the neighborhood. I've seen him in church. We’ve never spoken.” Mr. Rivers had only begun attending the Sunday service in the past few years. I wondered what had brought him there.
He recounted all of this with remarkable composure, as if this new betrayal had already been absorbed into the long list of burdens he carried. His calm unsettled me. It reflected a fortitude I could not comprehend.
My laptop cursor blinked beside the word “Children.” I glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes had passed already, and much of his medical history still lay unexplored. I typed a placeholder: “1 daughter.”
“How has your mood been recently?” I asked. “With everything going on?”
“Well, with everything going on… I guess not too great.”
He confessed that he was sleeping no more than three hours a night. The nightmares had grown more vivid.
“Sometimes I wake up yelling orders, like we’re back in the jungle. I tell the boys where to lay, how to keep from getting crushed when the tanks roll through.” He shook his head once, as if to clear the memory. “That’s just how the nights go sometimes.” We had hit another turning point, now leading back to the dense undergrowth that still haunted his sleep. This time, I felt the clock tugging against my instinct to let him speak, and I soon moved on to his physical exam.
To me, Mr. Rivers was the embodiment of medicine’s constant struggle: to honor humanity while meeting clinical demands. What struck me most was the absurdity of hurriedly documenting a lifetime of heartbreak into a few lines of the electronic record. When our time ended, Mr. Rivers pressed his palms to his knees and rose slowly. There was a new softness in his eyes as he said “Thank you,” and I wondered if, for a moment, our appointment had eased the solitude he carried for so long. His words — “It was all just a lie”— lingered long after the door closed. I remained for a moment, his voice still in my head, before turning back to the chart to finish the note. Beside “Children,” the record kept its answer: “1 daughter.”
Aidan Kunju is a third-year medical student at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. His academic interests bridge neurology, ethics, and the medical humanities, with work spanning clinical research on Parkinson’s disease, narrative medicine, and the ethics of emerging technologies. Kunju was a recipient of the Paul Kalanithi Writing Award 2023 for his poetry. Beyond medicine, he engages in creative writing and the visual arts as ways of reflecting on patient care and the human condition.