When Jeff and Nancy Lockwood arrived at their son’s hospital bed in Wenatchee, Washington, thousands of miles away from their home in Laramie, Ethan was on a ventilator and couldn’t speak.
A head-on collision with a truck driven by a drowsy driver had left Ethan with 13 fractures, a brain injury and life-threatening damage to his heart. Doctors and nurses had gotten him through the night, including emergency surgery, before his parents arrived that morning in 2024.
“I don’t know the rules, so I ask the nurse, ‘Can I, you know, can I touch him?’” Jeff Lockwood told WyoFile.
Wash your hands first, the nurse instructed.
“Not only can you touch him,” Lockwood recalls her saying, “But stand at his bedside, hold his hand as long as you can. Talk to him. Eat your meal in here. Smells, sounds, and touch are getting in. We don’t know exactly how this works with the comatose brain, but we know empirically that survival rates, recovery rates are much higher with this kind of contact.”
“So we did,” he said.
Ethan’s accident and the grueling months of recovery that followed forced the family to confront not just their own mortality, but the power and limits of medical knowledge. They also realized, Jeff said, the challenges that healthcare providers face in integrating technical expertise with human compassion. Altogether, the experience inspired Jeff to write “Hurting, Healing, Hoping: A Trio of Medical Operas,” which premieres in Laramie this weekend.
Lockwood, a recently retired professor of philosophy and creative writing, said he hopes the operas will foster mutual understanding between patients, providers and caregivers.
“One of things I want the opera to do is what I think a good professor does, or a good minister does,” he said. “And that is: I want to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Those in the audience who are going through stuff, I want them to know they’re not alone. And those sometimes young people who assume that stuff happens to old people like me, or that bad stuff happens to other people, I want to discomfort people a little bit.”
Each of the three 20-minute pieces shares a narrative thread, and together they’re designed to be accessible to a wide audience. The libretto, or lyrics, will also be projected over the stage.
“This is a great starter opera,” Lockwood said, adding that an aficionado can also expect to appreciate it.
Lockwood worked with composer Michael Udow, who will also conduct the performances. Udow spent 42 years as the principal percussionist with the Santa Fe Opera and 27 years teaching at the University of Michigan.
The opera’s three singers will include tenor Thomas Bocchi, baritone Dante Mireles and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Wór. They will perform with an orchestra mainly featuring University of Wyoming Department of Music faculty members, including John Fadial, Jiwon Han, Ross McIntosh and Beth Vanderborgh. Sophia Oehlers Maeda, a Colorado oboist, will join them.
While Lockwood has written a dozen fiction and nonfiction books, he said he chose opera in this instance because he believes it is the ideal art form for moving minds and touching hearts. This is his sixth opera.
“Words tend to be something that we process rationally, analytically, cognitively. I mean, they can evoke feeling but not like music,” he said. “When you say, ‘God, I don’t have words for it,’ What you’re saying is, ‘I need music.’”
The opera’s two performances will take place at 7 p.m. on October 23 and 24 at the Gryphon Theatre in Laramie Plains Civic Center. Tickets can be purchased online. All proceeds will go to the Laramie Downtown Clinic.
