Fireflies

My infant son was dying in my arms, dying at four months old, and I couldn't do anything to help him. He had been diagnosed that morning with RSV virus and sent home with a few medications and watchful parents. Now at 9:00 PM he was sitting on my lap and going into respiratory arrest. He stopped breathing, became unresponsive, and then the color just drained out of him. He turned white as a sheet. He went limp.

Chaos.

Five older brothers and sisters and a frantic mother could do nothing except panic, and I wasn't far from it. But his time was not up yet, and a 911 dispatcher's calm and quick suggestions earned her a ticket into heaven that night. Thank you wherever you are.

Later, in the emergency room of Sharps Grossmont hospital in San Diego his breathing stopped again. All eighteen nurses on duty in the ER came to help, and when they asked for authorization for a lumbar puncture, or spinal tap, and forced us out of the room, I experienced tunnel vision for the first, and last time in my life. I guess if my little boy couldn't breathe my body didn't want to breathe either. Without oxygen, my vision shrunk to a tiny fisheye lens on a field of black, sounds became echoey, and I fainted. Needless to say, I survived, and so did Scottie, but it did nothing to lessen the fear that wracked my body for the rest of the night. A transfer by ambulance to Children's Hospital. A 4:00 AM check-in to intensive care. Baby still barely breathing. Waiting. Wondering. IV's and epinephrine, pulse and blood oxygen monitors, tubes in the nose. He didn't even cry when they stuck him with the needles.

There are times in your life when the fog rolls in, and you are alone with the crashing of the waves. You know the waves are there but not how far, and you wonder if the tide will come in and sweep you away in the night. For a while you are lost in the fog, but then the morning comes and the sun burns it all away. That sleepless night we were lost, my son, (now ex) wife and I. The respiratory therapist finally arrived about 5:45 AM to administer a breathing treatment, an atomized mixture of anti-inflammatories. Its little white fog crept out of the nebulizer's tube and bathed Scottie's face, wisps of it gently sneaking into his tiny nose and mouth, and with each labored breath the wisps became a little bigger. Heart rate increased, breathing got stronger, and blood oxygen shot from 64% to 97%. Just as the sun was returning to burn away the coastal fog outside, our son was returning to us. We propped him up a little, and for the first time in what seemed like days, he looked at me with recognition in his infant eyes, and he smiled. I knew he was going to make it.

There are times in life when the fog rolls in, and there are times when the fog breaks. There are times when everything turns around. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but make no mistake, things will turn. Physicists use the term "moments of inertia," to describe nonphysical points around which physical bodies rotate. Invisible internal spheres or axis, with no differentiation, no demarcation from their surrounding mass. Yet they are the centers that guide the parent bodies. There are moments in life around which lives revolve, moments when everything turns around. There are moments of fear. And there are moments of solace.

When I moved from Texas to California, I left my family behind to build a new family, and I became so wrapped up in my own successes and struggles that I lost touch with them. I heard nothing about the trials of life they were going through themselves. It's funny how ill wills linger on and are forgotten, how old transgressions are lost and new ones are born. I don't know if you believe in fate or chance or destiny, or if you prescribe to divine will or blind luck. But I can tell you that no matter what you read or hear, bad things DO happen to good people, and most times there is no silver lining. Why do people try to talk you out of feeling sadness when you've suffered a loss?

There are times in life when everything falls apart, but it's funny how the pieces always come together to form something new. Not necessarily better, but different. As for people, people CAN change, and people do, whether they mean to or not. One family shatters and two more are born. Building blocks are stacked and knocked down again, and from them the wonder of life's mystery emerges. The births and birthdays, the ilnesses and the deaths, the fireflies never caught and the children's lost teeth left under pillows, these are the moments that change us. These are our moments of inertia. And it is what we do with them that redeems us or tears us down.

On the day of my father's funeral I finally made amends with my little sister. It had been a feud of fifteen years or more which had mostly been forgotten halfway through, but its effects carried more out of an embarrassment to apologize than out of any form of malice. Lives were spent apart, and now that we were speaking again, it seemed like all we had to talk about was our individual misfortunes, our war stories. I felt guilty about all my fretting over my divorce and its repercussions when I found out about her brain tumor. No words or tears can ever express how sorry I am for all the things I did, or didn't do. I can't ask for forgiveness, but I thank God for that moment of redemption.

There are moments in everyone's life that can never be forgotten. Where were you when you learned Kennedy had been shot? Or Lennon? When you saw the World Trade Center coming down? Will you ever forget receiving a folded flag and the thanks of a nation? Will you ever forget the last time you heard your mother's voice after she's gone? Or will you ever forget the first time you heard your child's? For me that tiny little cry in the delivery room heralded the beginning of two lifes, the baby's and mine? There are moments spectacular in silence, moments when all the clocks stop ticking, moments when the vast mechanisms of the cosmos revolve around you. I remember holding a brand new little life cradled in my arms. I remember watching two little eyes opening up to the brightness of a new world. And I remember seeing recognition (albiet I must have been nothing but a blure to him), and love in those eyes. It was a moment that could stop wars, a moment when I got a glimpse behind the looking glass, and a peek into the place where rainbows and dreams are born. And it was the one singular moment in my life when I had the answer to that question "Why am I here?"

My father's wake was held in the same chapel in Fort Worth that he had been re-married in, but this time it looked much smaller. Time to say goodbye. The bagpiper had slipped in the back door, and when his music swelled it took me by surprise. The bagpipes are loud, very loud, and in the chapel every note of "Amazing Grace" stunned me like a twenty one gun salute. Goodbye, Dad.

There are moments when you have to say goodbye.

For the first time ever, our car, actually our SUV, stuffed with two adults and six kids, was silent. They had learned earlier that day of their grandfather's death and we were en route to drop them off for the funeral. The stadium the Padres called home sits at the corner of highways 8 and 15 in San Diego. As we merged onto 15 north we came into view of the stadium, and that night they had four spotlights pointed straight up into the night sky, like the Luxor times four. Brilliant blue fireworks were erupting, pierced by the skyward beams. It was a beautiful sight, and at that moment, Lauren, the youngest girl, curled up in her mother's lap, began to weep softly, the first time since she learned the news.

Moments of sadness and wonder.

I remember a more normal outing in that SUV, packed with six children, one of which was not yet born. We were on our way to the pediatrician for a sonogram of our upcoming brother and son. I remember seeing a tiny little head and belly emerge from the darkness, then a hand came up. Jointed little skeleton fingers, nothing more than a wisp and a whisper of new life. Slowly it rotated back and forth, as if somehow he was marvelling at the miracle of his hand just like I was. Then slowly one finger after another curled up into a little fist, and splayed back out again and gave a little wave. I could have sworn he was trying to say "Hello, Dad."

I know some day it will be his turn to say goodbye to me, but I'm hoping to spend many happy moments with him before that day comes.