A River Between Generations: Reflections on Time, Care, and Legacy

Returning Home

When we disembarked in Basel, my heart felt both full and tender. My parents moved slowly but smiled constantly. My mother-in-law declared it the most beautiful trip of her life. I booked a private tour for eight hours to see the Swiss Alps and lakes. We visited Lauterbrunnen and the stunning village of Mürren via cable car, and drove along Lake Brienz, mesmerized by the mountains, rolling green hills, and stunning turquoise water. After spending the night in Zurich, we flew home the next day. Despite delays and missing our connection from O’Hare back to Cleveland, and fatigue from hours of flight and travel, my parents never complained. Despite frustrations with travel delays, I found myself silently thanking time itself—for giving us this chapter together.

Back home to Akron, I returned to the operating room, the meetings, clinics, and the tempo of modern medicine. But something in me had shifted. I now keep both the image of that cathedral wall and the way the river flowed across centuries—both reminders that endurance, not urgency, defines the things that last.

The river still flows somewhere far away, carrying stories older than mine. And I am reminded: In both life and medicine, we are all builders and travelers at once—laying stones we may never see completed, guiding those we love along the water’s edge.

May we all find a river that slows us, a cathedral that humbles us, and a family that reminds us why we journey at all.

Dr. Wei is the Alfred J. Magoline Endowed Chair in otolaryngology–head neck surgery, division director of pediatric otolaryngology at Akron Children’s Hospital in Akron, Ohio, and professor of otolaryngology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Northeast Ohio College of Medicine in Cincinnati, Ohio.