Sleep well, my son

Sad and beautiful...

Your soul is a select landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.

All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.

-Clair de lune by Paul Verlaine

Although From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra is a journey on that Big River called Jazz, I need to portage my canoe and take a moment to reflect…

The day before my son died, it was a beautiful day. The next day it rained.

He died on August 22nd, his younger brother’s birthday. The irony is unmistakable and a reminder of the cycle of life - a melding of the two forever. However, this story starts two days earlier on August 20th - my birthday.

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August 20, 2024:

On our morning walk, my dog Bear led me on a path I had not walked before, through the neighbor’s trees to the garage and around to the front of their house, where I found a small sparrow stuck in a glue trap. It was alive and looking steadily up at me. I reached down and grabbed it, thinking I might be able to release it. I gently pulled it free with little damage to its wings. I held it perhaps too long. As I let it go, it chirped and flew up to a nearby tree. It was free. I did not fail to feel the significance of that moment, as if my son’s soul said, “It’s ok, Papa. I am free.” It took my breath away.

Since my son entered the hospital a few days earlier, time had been moving so incredibly slowly for me. In some incomprehensible way, a day felt like a week. It reminded me of the strange time experience Victor Frankl described in Man’s Search For Meaning as “deformed time - inner time”. He wrote:

In camp, a small-time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless… My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week.

For me, this strange time experience slowed in direct proportion to a growing hollowness in my heart that was so strong I felt I could hear it - a constant hum of hollowness. It was relentless. The only time it went away was when I slept. But as soon as I woke up, it was there again. In some ways, I think that my son and I shared a longing for sleep to find release from our constant pain and suffering.

August 21, 2024:

Early in the morning, my son was in tremendous pain. We asked the staff to provide him with more comfort. At 1:00 pm the doctors called us together to assess my son’s condition and decide how we should increase his comfort level while not causing any further harm to his fragile system. His medication was increased and he rested more easily.

At 3:00 pm we had a family meeting at home to share our concerns and discuss other options. We had a good game plan for the next day and started making arrangements. After dinner, we made another quick visit to the hospital to say goodnight.

At 9:45 pm, my wife had a strange feeling and called the hospital. They told her they were just about to call us, as our son was experiencing difficulty breathing. We rushed back to see him. It all came so suddenly. Just like that, the moment was upon us. We hardly had time to comprehend it. At 10:00 pm, we entered his room and straight to his bedside. We only had a minute with him in a conscious state to tell him we loved him and say goodbye before the nurses sedated him. Of course, we didn’t know it then, but we were still six hours and thirty-five minutes away from watching him take his last breath.

After an hour or more, as hard as I tried I could not describe how I was feeling, a mixed bag of sadness and anticipation for what was inevitably coming and that “deformed time” moving so slowly. All along and so maddeningly reliable was that constant hum of hollowness, like a hunger pang that can’t be quenched.

August 22, 2024:

At midnight, I thought about the French composer Claude Debussy, who although he never managed to free his style from a kind of passive Romanticism, nevertheless showed the way to younger composers Ravel and Stravinsky. It was Debussy’s birthday.

As the hours slowly passed, I found myself trying to compare the hollowness I felt to some other time. I tried to recall if it was the same when my dad and mom passed away, but this felt much heavier and the hum louder. Perhaps it was closer to when someone you love breaks your heart.

At 2:35 am with my son, my wife and her two sisters, my son’s girlfriend and her mother, and me in the room, the doctor called for the Chaplain. With my wife holding one hand and my son’s girlfriend holding the other, we all prayed for my son.

At 3:52 am his blood pressure medication was reduced, and we acknowledged that the time was coming for us to set him free. We told him again that we loved him and were proud of him. We told him he had fought long enough and it was ok to let himself go.

At 4:30 am the ventilator was removed, and at 4:35 am my son took his last breath. He was free, and I had a vision of the small sparrow flying from my hand up into that tree on my birthday.

In perhaps the most difficult moment, we all left my son behind at the hospital and went home. I immediately wondered if the last two days of constant pain, anxiety for the future, the aggressive intervention at the end of his life, and the way we left him alone in that hospital bed were merciless. It made me wonder if there was a better path we could have chosen for him. I suspect I will never fully reconcile the way it ended, but you can’t go back.

After a short sleep, I tried to understand my feelings, but again they were unclear. The hum of hollowness was no longer there. I did feel a sense of relief, but also an anxiousness about what my life would be like now - I was on a path I had not walked before.

August 30, 2024:

As I have had time to reflect, I think God has taken my son so I can learn from him. So I can use the lessons his death taught me about myself. I realize I learned a lot from this experience. I am reminded of something William Blake wrote: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Yes, it was a tough lesson, but I must use my son’s death as an instrument; given for an end. I must accept it and honor it. In Jorge Luis Borges’ essay Blindness, he wrote:

Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all have been given like clay, like material for one’s art… Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

As I write this, it has been over a week since my son passed and that hum of hollowness is completely gone. It’s too early to know if it will be replaced with a new feeling. Again I am reminded of Borges’ Blindness:

I remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposophy, which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when something ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutory, but the execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not what we will gain. We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

Frankl wrote in Man’s Search For Meaning:

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

I ask God now to help me be worthy of my suffering.

My son lived a good life. Sometimes I think it was cut short, but no, it was just right. It was his life, and it was sad and beautiful.

Right now, I choose to think he’s on a long vacation. He loved to travel. So in my mind’s eye, I imagine him in Eastern Europe, maybe in Prague, and then on his way to Bucharest…

When he returns from his travels, he will have a lot to share with me about the places he has been and the things he has seen. There will be a great reunion.

Until then my son, sleep well.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of guitarist Walter Trout.

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Until then, keep on walking….