I remembered it as vividly as if it were yesterday. It was around 24 years ago when I heard somebody knocking on the front door of my surgery with unusual rapidity. “Doctor, it’s urgent.” I asked the patient inside to excuse me.

In came a young girl in an advanced stage of labour. I had nothing prepared. I was taken unawares. There was nowhere to deliver other than my office couch, so we quickly made an impromptu bed and, lo and behold, she delivered a healthy, beautiful baby in no time.

She was single. Neither she nor her mother wanted to keep the baby and her father was oblivious to all this. At that time, I had young children myself. So we took some nappies (disposable nappies were unheard of) and baby clothes and wrapped the child in them.

With the baby safe and cared for, it was time for the next important decision: what to do with the baby that I had just brought into the world. I urgently needed to find adoptive parents but this was no easy matter, as the adoptive parents had to be a responsible, loving, caring couple where the husband had a stable job in order to be able to provide for this baby, give it the necessary education for a bright future and, above all, rear it within a solid moral environment.

For adoptive parents, I chose a couple I had known for quite a long time. They could not have children themselves and so they were overjoyed at the news.

Destiny however, had not finished with this child. The adoptive mother had infective jaundice (Hepatitis A) and therefore could not take the baby straightaway. So my wife volunteered to look after the child. She took the baby to our home and she looked after her with the same loving care she lavished on our own children. We were back to a familiar routine. Nights were spent bottle-feeding and changing nappies. But my wife took all this in her stride as she had simply fallen in love with this innocent, beautiful baby.

Four weeks later, the adoptive parents called to collect the child. With tears in her eyes, my wife handed the baby to two happy people who henceforth assumed the responsibility of parents.

We were asked to be godparents, something we gladly and proudly agreed to. But after that, I am sad to say, I more or less lost contact as my heavy workload kept me busy most of the day and a good part of the night. My wife, though, did meet the parents and the child occasionally, and gave me brief progress reports. I suspect that the early bonding was never erased from her heart.

About three weeks ago I was alone in the house preparing to go out. The doorbell rang and I went out to see who it was. It was a young couple. We met halfway down the steps leading to the gate. A beautiful young woman handed me an envelope.

I had no idea who they were and they must have noticed the question in my eyes. The young woman came forward and said: “I am the daughter of … (and here she mentioned her parents). We have come to invite you to our wedding.”

I was dumbfounded and frankly completely lost. My wife Franca had gone out on an errand with my daughter. I stared at the beautiful girl and suddenly I remembered it all. Wow! “My wife and I will be extremely glad to be at your wedding. I am so glad to have met you again. Dear me, how the years have rolled by!”

The wedding day arrived but, once again, fate intervened. Franca was confined to her bed with a fever. She had a hacking cough and a very hoarse voice. We had looked forward to that day with so much expectation but, as far as Franca was concerned, she was not to see her “adopted” daughter marry.

So I went alone.

Throughout the Church ceremony I couldn’t help thinking of the baby I had delivered in those unusual circumstances and how simply radiant she now looked. Fair hair, blue eyes, inimitable figure, beautifully dressed – the adopted daughter of parents who had brought her up in love and worked so hard to give her a good start in life. Now they were ready to pass on the baton to her and her husband, both starting on the next stage of life’s journey. And the words of a dimly remembered poem came back to me:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not

even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

As she left the church, I lagged behind to let the flow through and then walked out to the church parvis, where she stood happily smiling, beautiful and radiant. Yes, the medical profession is a satisfying profession after all. And one more line out of that almost forgotten poem came back to me.

“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

And on that church parvis, deep in my thoughts, I could see the torch of life that had almost been extinguished so many years back, flare strongly and steadily.

God is good.