“Son, I love you.”
This was heaven.
Epilogue. THE REFRAIN OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
1
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
Thus we end as we began, with agony and compulsion. But what exactly have we been through? What did you just read? As I said at the start, this book is fact, with a layer of fiction. But how much of each? You’ve got a right to know.
Ninety percent of the events have been described as accurately as I can remember them. But memory, like reality (or perhaps the two are the same), can be illusory. So to verify my recollections of the mostly factual events and conversations I’ve just described, I asked several persons who were with me to read this manuscript and compare it to what they perceived, to make suggestions for alterations. Where appropriate for accuracy, those suggestions were followed. As a further test for accuracy, I referred to hospital records and a lengthy diary that my wife maintained throughout Matt’s ordeal.
But what are the facts? Everything I described did happen-except for the obvious. I’m forty-four years old. Thus, at the age of eighty-four, I didn’t have a deathbed vision that took me back forty years to try to save my son. I didn’t anticipate the staph and strep that would give my son septic shock. I didn’t become an amateur doctor, sneak into the hospital in the middle of the night, and give my son Vancomycin. I didn’t head off the infection that sent Matt from the Bone Marrow Ward to Intensive Care, where after eight days of suffering he died from heart arrest. Everything that happens from the moment I wake up on my kitchen floor is invented. But everything in my nightmare during the fainting spell, all the specifics of the disaster I’m trying to avert, God have mercy, actually took place.
Examples.
On Thursday, one day before Matt contracted septic shock, did I foolishly run when the temperature-humidity index was one hundred and three and subsequently collapse on my kitchen floor?
Yes. But while in the book I forced myself to go to the hospital in response to a nightmare of precognition, in reality I staggered to bed and had to stay there until the next day when I managed to get to the hospital two hours before Matt went into shock.
The initial medical explanation for my fainting spell was dehydration and an imbalance in the electrolyte components of my blood, i.e., loss of sodium and potassium. But fluids, sodium, and potassium didn’t make me feel strong again and didn’t take away my dizziness. In fact, when Matt was rushed to Intensive Care Friday evening, my disorientation worsened. On Saturday, after his kidneys failed and a hole was cut into his abdomen, a tube inserted, fluid poured in and drained out to vent his poisons, I had the unnerving sense that the floor was tilting. The flashing red numbers on his monitors made my heart rush in rhythm with them. When I leaned against a wall, it felt wobbly, as if I’d fall through it.
On Sunday morning, when Matthew’s lungs began to accumulate fluid from too many hours on the respirator, I finally collapsed. The doctors, fearing I’d suffered a heart attack, rushed me to the Emergency Ward, where a team of specialists couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with me. Stress and exhaustion, they diagnosed. But I realize now, because of subsequent medical treatment, that what I endured was a panic attack. In this book, I moved the panic attack back, from Sunday to Thursday, and made it a part of my imagined eighty-four-year-old dying vision.
The attack, I assure you, was real. Indeed, several months before, when Matt’s chemotherapy kept producing no results, my wife experienced a similar attack. In her case, vomiting was an extra symptom. Dizzy, helpless, with a terrifying headache, rising blood pressure and heartbeat, she had to be rushed from a supermarket to the Emergency Ward, where her chronic hypertension made the doctors suspect she was having a stroke. The results of tests made them reconsider their diagnosis and conclude that my wife had labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection that upsets balance, produces nausea, and makes a victim so disoriented he or she swears that death is moments away. Valium was prescribed. For seven days, my wife had to walk with a cane. It is possible that my wife’s labyrinthitis was a panic attack; I’ll never know. But I certainly had one, and many others later.
Did Matthew’s surgeons interrupt his eight-hour operation three hours into it to tell Donna and me that his tumor might be inoperable, that we had fifteen minutes to make a life-and-death decision: whether to close him up right now, allow him a relatively painless summer, and wait for his death in the fall, or whether to take out his ribs and however much of his lung, then go for the trauma of a bone marrow transplant, and hope he survived for a long productive life?
You bet that happened. Until that time, it was the worst day of my life, though there were many more horrible days to come.
Did I see fireflies in the darkness of my bedroom the night after Matthew died? Yes.
Did I experience a sudden inexplicable sense of peace when I entered the church the night before Matt’s funeral, as if his spirit was telling me to grieve for myself but not for him because, in the firefly’s word, Matt was “okay”? You bet.
But those two-I hesitate to call them “mystical”-sensations can be accounted for on a subjective level. A skeptic would say that I saw what I wanted to see, that I felt what I needed to feel. I wouldn’t argue. Till recently, I’ve always referred to myself as an agnostic, another word for hedging my bets, for saying I’m not sure about such ultimate matters as an afterlife and God. Not sure but not unsure either. Straddling the fence. Let’s wait and see. God could exist. Maybe not.
The thing is, though, I did see the dove in the mausoleum. Reread my description of it in part one. It did behave in one of the three ways I mentally predicted. You’ll have to take my word for those predictions. But the fact is, in front of twelve witnesses, the frantic dove suddenly settled to the floor as the priest completed the final rites over Matthew’s ashes. The dove did allow me to pick it up. I did say, “And now I’ll set Matthew free.” I did carry the dove outside the mausoleum, and when I opened my hands, the dove (formerly panicked) did refuse to fly away. Until I thought, Dear God, I hope it isn’t hurt. And at that point, a voice in my head said, “Dad, I’m all right,” and the dove flew away.
You can doubt that my subjective reactions were mystical experiences. But what isn’t open to doubt is that the dove was there and behaved as I’ve described. A chain of coincidences? Perhaps. But how many coincidences do there need to be until you finally grant that something extraordinary, far beyond probability, took place? In my own case, I know I reached that limit. I started to slip off the fence. I began to wonder if the fireflies in my bedroom and my sudden sense of peace in the church were as subjective as a skeptic would claim. I took a step away from agnosticism toward…
Well, let’s put it this way. I’ve got this friend. He and his wife, after a yearlong lull in our relationship, showed up at the hospital the day after Matt contracted septic shock. They needed just one look at Donna, Sarie, and me to realize how helpless we felt, how much we required support.
In the worst of Matt’s illness, I used to be so preoccupied I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten or slept, and this was when I was having what I didn’t know were panic attacks. My friend and his wife would force Donna, Sarie, and me to eat food they’d brought to the hospital. They’d compel us to take turns going back to their home, to lie down and try to rest. Compassionate is too weak a word to describe their behavior. (I hasten to add that some so-called friends who’d stayed in close contact in the year before Matt’s illness fled from us as if we had the plague the moment they heard Matt had… dreaded word… could the disease be contagious?… we don’t want our children to get it… dare we say it?… cancer.)