The Song in Ward Seven

Margaret Chen was fifty-three years old and dying of pancreatic cancer when she started singing hymns in Ward Seven of St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City. Not quietly. Not under her breath. She sang them the way her grandmother had taught her — full-voiced, unhurried, as if the fluorescent lights above her were cathedral windows.

The nurses asked her to keep it down. Her roommate, a retired professor named Diane, rolled her eyes and requested a transfer. The attending physician gently suggested that Margaret "process her emotions in healthier ways."

Margaret kept singing.

Within a week, Diane stopped requesting the transfer. Within two weeks, she was asking Margaret about the words. By the third week, Diane was sitting on the edge of Margaret's bed at four in the morning, weeping, asking how a woman with three months to live could sing like that.