Surrogates

Everyday Angels in Parking Lots

I knew from his voice the moment he said “hi, Mom” that something had happened. He was on the Taconic Parkway in the dark, driving himself home for winter break. A deer had jumped onto the highway ten feet in front of his car. He swerved and could not miss it, and the impact sent the deer launching into the trees and brush in the median. He had already called the insurance company by the time he called me. He was rattled but not hurt.

We talked through our options: insurance and roadside assistance, or AAA. He turned on his camera so I could see the car, and we agreed that getting off the highway and to a gas station was a good plan. I told him I would call both companies while he drove. A $400 tow home was the answer I got, and I withheld that piece. Instead, I asked him questions to gauge his comfort and confidence.

After looking at the radiator and checking for leaking fluids, he said that if he ripped the grill off and duct-taped the fender to the metal underneath, the car was completely drivable. I stayed on the phone while he bought the tape and began the demolition.

In the background, I heard the voice of a man. It was deep, calm, parental, and reassuring.

“Deer?”

“Yeah.”

“Save that piece with the fur in it for insurance.”

“Thanks, that’s a good call.”

“You got someone coming?”

“No, I think I’m gonna limp it home.”

“You’re not leaking fluids.”

“Thank you, I checked that too.”

“Yeah, you’re good. Good luck.”

“Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.”

I listened to the whole exchange from forty miles away. He does not have a dad. And there I was again, trying my best to fill that role.

What broke my heart was the sparseness of it. Men take care of each other in short sentences, in practical gestures, and in steady voices that never name the tenderness underneath. My son met that register without hesitation, stoic and mature, trying not to need help but grateful for it, and I realized he had learned a language no one in our house had been there to teach him.

Something in my chest tightened and released at the same time. The voice belonged to a stranger at a gas station somewhere along the Taconic. He did not know my son. He did not know that my son does not have a father. He did not know that the calm, steady, fatherly tone he offered was filling a space that has been empty for years. He simply walked over and said the things a dad would say.

I have learned that there are people in the world who do this. They appear without knowing what they are filling. They offer exactly what is missing, not because they see the wound, but because kindness is their instinct.

I think of the man in the parking garage at New York Presbyterian Hospital. The check-in days at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital were always tense and long. We would arrive by nine in the morning, and Oliver would have labs drawn, and we would wait in the clinic for a bed to open. Sometimes it took the entire day, until five or six in the evening.

My husband was home with our three other children, trading shifts with my father or sister so that one of us could always be at the hospital and one could always be at the house. We were a family divided across two locations by something no one should have to carry, and on this day, I was struggling to carry it.

It was dusk, and I was on the edge. I never slept well before hospital visits, and on that day I was cracking. The parking garage was multi-floored and hard to navigate with many bags. The cart from the hospital was clunky and fighting me. Halfway across the parking lot, a bag slid off the cart and hit the concrete, and I welled up with tears.

A parking attendant came over. He put the bag back on the cart and reorganized the rest, stacking them so they would hold. Then he looked at me and said, “It’s okay.”

He did not know Oliver. He did not know what we were carrying, what floor we had come from, or how many more visits we had ahead of us. He saw a woman falling apart in a parking lot, and he walked over, and he fixed the small thing he could fix, and he said two words that made all the difference in that moment.

It’s okay.

Not “it will be okay,” which would have been a promise he could not keep. Just “it’s okay.” Right now, in this moment, you are allowed to crack, and someone is here, and the bags are back on the cart.

These are the surrogates. They are the strangers who step into a role they do not know is vacant. One became a father for three minutes at a gas station. Another became a partner for ten seconds in a parking garage. They do not stay. They are not meant to stay. They arrive, they fill the silence with something warm and human, and they move on without knowing what they did.

I do not believe they are accidents. I believe they were sent.

Thank you, angels. Once again.