5. The lungs were heavy in weight and fluid, consistent with respiratory distress syndrome. (The oxygen pumped into Matt’s lungs to keep him breathing would eventually have poisoned his lungs.)
6. The kidneys were swollen. The outer layers were pale, consistent with damage due to septic shock. (If his heart hadn’t killed him, his kidneys might have.)
7. The bladder was inflamed and hemorrhagic. (How much can a poor kid withstand?)
8. Both the stomach and the esophagus had ulcers. (Why not? Everything else had gone to hell.)
9. A cerebral aneurysm was present in one of the vessels in the brain, an abnormal dilation of the blood vessel. He also had small areas of bleeding along the lining of the brain. (Sure, the consequence of the septic shock, and if the cancer hadn’t killed him and the heart attack hadn’t, maybe with Matthew’s bad luck, he’d have had a stroke.)
10. The liver was found to be enlarged. (Might as well throw that in. The chemotherapy was extreme, all right. After the removal of four ribs and a third of a lung, he wasn’t strong enough to bear any further stress.)
If you have any questions, please call [the letter concluded]. Sincerely…
7
David did have one question. How can life be so cruel? But the question at bottom was philosophical and an inappropriate response to an autopsy that proved his point empirically. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Watch out for the boogeyman. Eat your Wheaties. Say your prayers. Walk around ladders. Brush your teeth after every meal. Stay away from the teddy bears’ picnic. And count every second without pain or disaster as a major stroke of luck.
Entropy. That was the secret. The messiness of the universe.
As Sarie held his weakening hand in Intensive Care, David heard faintly, through the wheeze of the oxygen pump and a humming in his ears, the words she’d recited at Matthew’s funeral. How proud he’d been of her that day, how filled with love. The strength and composure she’d mustered against intolerable grief had made it possible for her somehow bravely to stand before the mourners at the church and to recite that day’s gospel, a text that with bitter irony happened to be from St. Matthew.
Sarie repeated it to him now. God bless her, she’d remembered the passage all these years. She spoke it again as she had with the same trembling voice combating sorrow so long ago. If he’d had the strength, he’d have reached up and hugged her just as he had before the mourners in the church so many years ago when she’d stepped unsteadily down from the lectern. The words were beautiful.
Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your soul will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.
Comforting thoughts. If a person believed.
But David at best had been an agnostic.
Until three incidents made him suspect there might be a spirit within the universe, a greater power than his pessimism allowed.
8
The first had occurred one night after Matthew’s death. Having somehow managed the strength to write Matthew’s eulogy, David had staggered to the master bedroom, where in a rare gesture of obeisance to a God whose existence he doubted, he’d sunk to his knees. The time was night. The room was dark. David’s eyes were raw with tears. Hands pressed to his swollen face, he’d prayed with a fervor that he swore would kill him.
Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! I want you back, son! This has to be a nightmare! Soon I’ll waken! You’ll be here!
One day before the septic shock that had ravaged Matthew’s body and eight days later killed him, David had used some brief time alone, when he and Donna weren’t sharing anxious hours together watching over Matthew in the hospital. David had driven home to change clothes. On impulse, based on a twenty-year daily habit, he’d decided to exercise, to run as was his custom, to clear his head and sweat tension from his body. After four miles, the farthest he could manage given his stress and weakness, he’d staggered into his kitchen, sipped a glass of water, and collapsed. Surely while he was passed out on the floor, this nightmare of his dear son’s death had come to him, and he hadn’t wakened yet. That was the explanation. None of this had happened. It was a nightmare.
So he’d hoped forty years ago as he’d knelt in trembling anguish beside the bed. While he squeezed his hands to his face and tears seeped through his clawlike fingers that threatened to tear his cheeks away, he’d prayed with all the desperation his soul could sustain that he would wake up from his stupor on the kitchen floor and his son would still be alive.
Oh, please! he’d prayed. Oh, Jesus, please!
But he’d known in a terrifying recess of his remaining sanity that he had indeed revived from his stupor on the floor, that he had indeed staggered back to the hospital, that his son had indeed suffered septic shock one day later and died eight unimaginably traumatic days after that.
Matthew! Matthew! Please! Come back to me!
Forty years ago, in his kneeling paroxysm beside the bed, his thoughts flashing through his mind like lasers, David had suddenly remembered yet another example of his wonderful son’s promising gifts. Not only the life-affirming pulse of music, whose throbbing chords continued to reverberate like a neverending tape through David’s head, but as well a poem, one of many, this one written during the disorientation and nausea of chemotherapy, a poem that Matthew had later submitted for an assignment at school.
Fifteen years old. With verbal gifts far superior to those of his father who defined himself by and made his living out of words. Fifteen years old, and in a panic at 4:00 A.M., the boy had wakened Donna, who slept beside him on a cot in the IV-stand-filled room, to dictate to her his sudden terrifying insights. A poem. Not linear, not rhymed and metered, not the singsong unintentional parody of a poem you’d expect from someone his age. Instead a gestalt of fear and memory. A jumbled synthesis of reaction to when life was perfect and then collapsed. A metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, of each piece having been beautifully assembled and then perversely ripped apart; of lost hair, fading friends, and fractured hopes; of the prejudice ignorant people showed toward cancer patients whose bald heads and gaunt cheeks looked like skulls; of dreams become tears and parties about to turn into wakes. Death and a jigsaw puzzle. If the poem wasn’t perfect, it was better than the father could have written at fifteen, or maybe could have ever written, and if a perceptive reader paid it due attention, the meaning was clear; the craft matched the content.
9
JIGSAW
10
Fifteen years old. Vomiting at 4:00 A.M. Dictating a poem.
God love you, son, David had sobbed on his knees, hunching over a bed, with his fingers like claws scraping into his tear-ravaged face. You are dead. I’m not unconscious on the kitchen floor. I’m here. I’ve just written your eulogy. And my existence, never content to begin with, will be forever empty until my own death.