Child abuse.
Intolerable.
Unforgivable.
Children are precious, to be cherished. I always knew that. Believe me, that knowledge has been reinforced.
5
Cancer. I used to be afraid of it. Not anymore. Because it once was an unknown enemy. But now it’s horribly familiar. And what’s familiar isn’t as fearsome as the unknown.
A few days ago, one of Matt’s doctors came to visit. I told him what I was writing. I expressed my concern that someone afflicted with cancer might be advised not to read this book.
The doctor shook his head in disagreement. “Matt’s cancer was rare, and it chose a rare site-a rib instead of an arm or a leg. As near as we can tell, though, we cured it.”
“He died!”
“Because of an infection of a type that almost never happens. A biological accident.”
“Whatever, he’s still dead!”
“David, listen. Based on the autopsy results, I have to believe Matt would have survived. From the cancer. You’ll hate me for saying this. Your son was unlucky. Rare cancer. Rare site. Resistant to chemotherapy. Finally responded. Shrank, but metastasized. Surgery got most of it. Chemotherapy combined with a bone marrow transplant got the rest of it, but a biological accident killed him. What we learned from Matthew’s death takes us a step ahead in curing Ewing ’s sarcoma.”
“What’s that got to do with-!”
“Whether a cancer victim should read this book? Your son, God bless him, may have been the only victim, in this country, of that rare cancer in that rare site. And he stared it bravely in the face. He went all the way with it. Successfully. Except for the septic shock. If Matt could stare that rare cancer in the face, imagine the inspiration he can provide to victims of much more common cancers, of malignancies we usually can cure. He provides an example. If Matt could be brave, given the worsening complications he stoically accepted, maybe he’ll show others how to fight their illness. David, you know we’ve had successes, even with Ewing ’s. You’ve spent six months in the cancer ward. You’ve seen patients go home.”
“Some didn’t.”
“There are no guarantees. What I’m saying is, panic’s an enemy too! But Matt didn’t panic! So finish the book. And if civilians read it-not a doctor like me and a veteran like you-maybe they won’t be so ignorant about chemotherapy and how it’s administered and why a patient goes bald and what the chemicals do and why and how and what and…”
So today I’ll finish the book, and maybe some readers will find it frightening, but maybe other readers will learn.
6
But why did I write this book as I did, so a portion of it was fiction? In a paradoxical way, the fictional portions too are fact.
I never believed Matt would die. To his final hours in Intensive Care, I remained convinced that he’d survive. After his death, I still could not accept it. Sure, the doctors came out to the waiting room and told us he was dead. Donna and Sarie saw the body (I was on the verge of another panic attack, physically incapable of standing, of going into his room). They described how pathetically lifeless Matt’s scarred, bruised corpse looked, finally out of pain.
“There must be a soul,” Donna said, “because without it he didn’t look the same. He just looked empty.”
Donna explained how the Intensive Care staff prayed along with her and Sarie over Matthew’s corpse. Then of course there was the autopsy, the cremation, and the funeral.
But even when we deposited the urn containing Matt’s ashes into the crypt, I still did not believe Matt was dead.
This isn’t real, I thought. This can’t be happening. It’s a nightmare. I’ll wake up, and Matt’ll be fine. For days afterward, and especially the nights, I used to pray for the terrible hallucination of Matt’s death to end. The only reason I was able to sleep is that I couldn’t wait to wake up and discover Matt’s death had been only a vivid nightmare.
Each morning as my consciousness focused, I’d feel a surge of hope, then realize that the nightmare hadn’t ended, the hallucination hadn’t faded, and I’d plummet back into despair. But still I’d keep saying, “This can’t be real.”
That was one of my reactions. Another was my utter conviction that if Matt’s death impossibly was real, there had to be a way to reverse what had happened, to go back in time and save him.
I truly believed that. I thought if I concentrated hard enough I could turn the clock back. I spent many hours praying for a miracle, for a time warp, for a chance to leap into the past and somehow keep Matt alive. Throughout Matt’s treatment, the doctors had given us detailed explanations about his disease and how they were trying to fight it. After Matt’s death, the doctors gave us equally detailed explanations about what had killed him, about the staph and the strep and the septic shock. Every stage of Matt’s treatment had been based on logic.
But a biological accident destroyed him. In case he developed a fever, a wide range of antibiotics was ready to be administered, and those antibiotics were given right away, the instant his fever started to rise. The infection was killed, but the shock the infection caused had been too strong for his weakened body.
In hindsight, the only way to have tried to save him (and I emphasize “tried” because there’d have been no guarantee the effort would have worked) would have been to administer the antibiotics before the fever started, to get a head start on the infection before it developed with the devastating swiftness of a fire storm.
But as a doctor explained, “Antibiotics are toxic when they don’t have anything to fight. Bacteria can get used to them, so if an infection does occur, the antibiotics aren’t effective.” In other words, prematurely administered antibiotics might have made Matthew’s condition even worse. Still, given the fact that Matt died anyhow, those antibiotics (if given before he seemed to need them) were all that might have saved him.
If. Might. Such despair-producing qualifiers. That’s what cancer patients die from, “but ifs.” If only this had worked or that hadn’t happened. If. I believe that Matthew’s doctors did everything in their power to try to save him. I understand how unorthodox it would have been for them to administer antibiotics before his symptoms demonstrated a need for that kind of treatment.
I’m not criticizing. I want to make that clear, and I also want to make it clear that parents of cancer victims shouldn’t try to be doctors or think they know better than medical experts. It isn’t even wise to go through medical texts, because those texts are often outdated (especially in terms of cancer research, which constantly develops new techniques of treatment).
But I keep telling myself this can’t have happened, it isn’t real, Matt didn’t die. And I keep telling myself those antibiotics were his only chance. So finally I wrote this book-to tell you what happened to my son, and at the same time to dramatize my sense of unreality.
Am I still in a faint on my kitchen floor? Has all of this been a nightmare? Will I wake up to discover that Matt didn’t die and I didn’t write this book?
I pray so. Or am I dying forty years from now, recalling the greatest loss of my life, still trying to find a way to bring Matt back? Anything’s possible, because as far as I’m concerned the impossible happened to Matt.
That’s what I meant when I said that even the 10 percent of fiction in this book is paradoxically true, because my fantasy dramatizes two phenomena of grief-the sense that it’s all a nightmare, and the need to go back in time and make matters right.
My final scene, in which Matthew dies in 1987 while “David” dies forty years later and their souls as fireflies surge blazing toward each other, illustrates something else I said. I mentioned I’m falling off the fence of agnosticism. I’m starting to believe in God and an afterlife. Because I need to. Because I so desperately want to see my son again. Believing in God gives me a hope. Can faith be far behind?