Saturday night I watched The Royal, a British show about a small rural hospital. I enjoy the show, but they have a tendency to kill people off at the end of a season and Saturday they started off with a train wreck that derailed every car on the track.
You knew somebody was going to die when you saw the cars perched precariously on their sides and teetering on top of each other. You had to hope it wasn't the sweet young Irish nurse who was coming back from a visit with her family, or the newly married couple just beginning their lives together, or the nice vicar who was visiting his mother after 3 years in the Indian mission fields.
The cut on the vicar's head wasn't serious, and he had a bruised rib that didn't appear fractured, just sore. It was touch and go for several moments while the young couple and the nurse and the new doctor were rescued from a burning car. It looked like nobody was going to die.
Then the vicar took a turn for the worse while his mother searched the hospital for him, politely, calmly asking, "Have you seen my son?"
When they took him to surgery, I found myself momentarily praying for him. I quickly remembered it was just a TV show and he wasn't really dying, but I cried anyway. I was surprised at the torrent of tears for a character I didn't even know.
I don't like my TV shows to be sad. I want them all to have happy endings. But that didn't explain the tears.
I wasn't crying for the vicar. I was crying for me.
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