“I Wonder as I Wander”
All My Puny Sorrows“I Wonder as I Wander” is Lottie’s favorite Christmas song, sung by her family during a Christmas Eve dinner in the Emergency department. Its place in this improvised celebration turns a familiar song into a shared ritual of remembrance, joining the fragile present of hospital care to the family’s continuing grief for those who are gone.
The Song in the Hospital
Lottie’s family makes a Christmas Eve dinner in Emergency, with their neighbor Amy bringing food, wine, cloth napkins, china, and silver cutlery. The meal is arranged on Lottie’s stomach as she lies in the hospital. Nora briefly removes her oxygen mask so she can drink; the nurse has allowed one sip for Christmas, but Lottie takes two. The family drinks champagne from plastic sample cups, an incongruous but deliberate celebration assembled within the limits of her illness.
They toast to a “straying notion” of themselves, the nurse who has treated them kindly, and the absent dead: Elfrieda Von Riesen, Jake Von Riesen, Tina, and Leni. Then they sing “I Wonder as I Wander,” the song Lottie loves. Its appearance is not a performance set apart from the scene but part of the family’s shared response to a night shaped by illness, care, and loss.
A Song of Remembrance
The song gathers the living family around names already bound to grief. Tina’s death followed a surgery that had at first seemed successful; at her funeral, her ashes were held in a wooden urn while relatives told stories about her. Elfrieda’s ashes, by contrast, are ultimately buried beneath a tree in Elmwood Cemetery, rather than in the East Village cemetery her mother had proposed. Against these different acts of mourning and decisions about remains, the Christmas song offers a temporary form of togetherness: the family can remember the dead collectively even while Lottie remains in hospital.
The scene gives the song its significance through the company it keeps. A permitted sip, champagne in sample cups, a lenient nurse’s smile, a toast, and a familiar song make a celebration out of an emergency-room visit without making the danger disappear. “I Wonder as I Wander” marks a moment when family life persists in altered circumstances, held together by remembrance and by the simple act of singing together.
