I Could Be Wrong, But…

In the middle of the night, Jack awakened, struggling to breathe.

His mother, asleep with me in the next room, was up and rushing to her son at his first unnaturally strained call to her.

She gathered her 5-year old son in her arms. She told me that it was an asthma attack. And a bad one.

Before that night, I had no experience with asthma. I did not even think of it as a disease, but as a nuisance easily controlled by over-the-counter concoctions being endlessly pedaled on television. I did not understand that as recently as my grandfather’s time, asthma was an indiscriminate killer of adults and children.

I drove the three of us to the emergency room. As I drove, Jack struggled to breathe. Hearing Jack bleat, cough, gag, and strain for a clear breath, made my own throat hurt each time I swallowed. The darkness held back by the beam of headlights was like an ocean wanting to crush us, drown us, under fathoms of blackness. Jack whimpered, frustrated for just one deep breath. Yet he was still a boy of five-- sleepy, crying, stunned and straining to simply breathe--but also assured. He was in his mother’s arms.

When I was a teenager I would sometimes stay awake for as long as I possibly could. After a long night of partying, I would realize that I had been awake for nearly 24 hours. So I would decide to continue to stay awake. Sometimes it was easy--circumstances--maybe a job to go to, or a class that could not be safely cut--carried me through a second day without sleep. Then the restless urge to go outside, to be with hyperactive friends, would carry me into a second night. We would drink beer, then later, coffee, and drive the backcountry roads and through the deserted town centers of coastal New England. Finally, sometime before the third full day without sleep, I would crawl into bed, my body aching as if I had been pummeled, and I would fall into a fitful sleep. It would take days to recover, to again feel in step with the people around me, the scheduled hours of school, work, television, the separation of day and night, the border marking the day from the night, one day from the next.

I sometimes hear people say that teenagers have no conception of death, and believe themselves to be immortal, indestructible. I wonder if these people thought deeper--remembered deeper--would they still assert this? When I was a teenager I was acutely aware of death, of my own mortality, and my inherent weakness. The difference between then and now, is that the understanding was new, and I raged against it. When you first confront the inescapable insult of death, what else is there to do, but to taunt it, prod it, handle it, tempt it close before dancing back from it? What else is there to do but to act out a relentless question--where in this world is there something so urgent, valuable, and worthy, that I should expend my life on it?

That night in the emergency room of a small hospital in Portland, Oregon the doctor was distant. He did not hear Jack’s mom tell him which medications had proven useless allies in Jack’s struggle. He then prescribed those same medications. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was simply doing what he had spent years being trained to do. Maybe he saw Jack not as a boy struggling for each breath, but as an equation with a few blanks that had to be filled in. Once the equation was balanced, Jack would breathe without pain or struggle, and live.

The younger we are, the more we live in the present. Every encounter is new--and must be lived through, sometimes fought through--if experience, alternatives, and antibodies--are to be gained.

Jack’s mom stood beside her son as he lay on the examination table for hour after hour, as much to shield him from the doctor as from the illness. Jack seemed to take her familiar presence for granted. Even as he strained for each breath, he looked around the hospital room, a curious observer in a strange, new world. He watched the doctor and nurse, the other patients, mostly very old people who stared blankly into space. He said nothing, and would only nod a yes or no to his mother’s or the doctor’s few questions. There was a quiet about him, a conservation of his energy, a certainty, even when a seizure of gasping overcame him, and wracked his body. Jack was wholly absorbed in something that was in the room with us. I could feel it, but only Jack could see it. His eyes were bright and alert with natural curiosity.

Near dawn, Jack began to breathe easier. By early daylight we were home.

Jack slept. When he awoke in the late afternoon, he had only a glancing memory of the long, tense night he had lived through in the emergency room. He was distressed that he had slept through all the morning cartoons on television, but then he looked over the hundreds of Lego blocks strewn across the floor of his bedroom and asked me, "What should I make?"

Before I could answer, he was already on the floor, at work.

I stood in the doorway, watching him. He was concentrated, entranced by the work of building, of creating.

Feeling off balance from a lack of sleep, as I watched Jack playing, I began to imagine, to sense, the two of us--and the very house we were inside of--spinning though the cold blackness of space.

But I also felt the warmth of the bright day coming in the window, and could not keep from staring at the swaying, leafy trees outside, stirred by the wind.

It is only by an unimaginable chance that our world circles just close enough to and just far enough from a single star.

But that makes everything possible.

I watched a young boy playing, the day after the night he had fully and decisively won his place in this precariously balanced world.

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