Every visit to the doctor, now, brings bad news. In the early days, there were reassurances and messages of hope – some boys make it out of their teens, there are ways to slow the deterioration of his muscles, he might stay mobile for a long time, he might still get to enjoy some of his boyhood in the ways that other boys take for granted – but now, there are only somber descriptions of what will happen next, of what needs to be done to make things easier, of what use can be made of his diminishing time.

They want to put rods in his spine, she tells me. So that he can stay upright for a bit longer.

Rods in his spine. He won’t be able to bend, I think, before remembering, he cannot bend now. Not in the real, active sense of bending, anyway: he slumps, he droops, he slides forward in his chair, unable to hold his own weight even while sitting, a Pinocchio without strings. His spine is collapsing under the weight of his body, his muscles having deteriorated beyond the point where they can provide any support. He’s like a doll now, a puppet. But he has no strings by which he might be pulled up. He has no Blue Fairy to wave a wand and make such strings unnecessary. He has only surgeons, and rods. (continue reading…)

It is, of course, our greatest fear. It is the bogeyman in our closet, the monster under our bed. It is the shadow that lurks behind every tree in the wood, it is the crackle of every twig, it is the sudden silencing of birds, the darkening of the sky, the unexpected chill in the air, the thing that stops our breathing, that quickens the beat of our hearts. And we cannot tell ourselves that it isn’t there, that it is just the stuff of fairy tales and scary stories; we cannot shine the flashlight into the closet or under the bed or out toward the trees and reassure ourselves, because it is out there, it is, maybe just as a possibility, maybe just as the faintest possibility, but that possibility is what gives it air to breath and matter to take form.

We could lose our children. Some harm could come to them. They could be erased from the landscape of our lives and our hearts could, would, break, shatter into a million, billion, trillion pieces and we would never recover, not really. (continue reading…)

Emilia is in love.

“Mommy, can I make a present for Josh? Because I love him.”

– “You LOVE Josh?”

“Yes. But it’s not love like getting-married love. And it’s not kissing-love. It’s FRIEND-love.”

– “Oh, good. Wait… what do you know about kissing?”

“That it makes your cheeks go red.”

OY. (continue reading…)

I don’t believe in petitionary or intercessory prayer. I’ve written about my reasons for this at length, but it boils down to this: I don’t believe in, can’t believe in, a God who responds to such prayer. As I said some months ago, ‘why should God help us find a cure for cancer, and not for muscular dystrophy? Find one lost child, and not another? Help the Red Wings win while leaving children dying in sub-Saharan Africa? If God is a god who lets bad things happen, the only way that I can understand that is if the point of letting bad things happen is to compel us to cope with pain and heartbreak and evil ourselves, alone, to better understand those things. And that idea of a didactic God doesn’t square with a picture of God as a moody patriarch who dispenses favors to his children on the basis of who supplicates most fervently.’

(continue reading…)

In the last year of my parents’ marriage, my dad had an affair. I’ve always known this, my mom has always known this, it was something that we all talked about, in later years: his regret, his remorse, over this thing he had done, its effect on my mother, its effect on our family, the fact that it led to a divorce that nobody wanted and that everybody regretted and that remained the great tragedy (and yet in some ways the great gift; this is a complicated story among many complicated stories, best left for another day) of both my parents’ lives.

He had an affair, and we knew it. But the fact that we knew it, and that we knew he regretted it, did not lessen the emotional blow of finding letters from this woman among his things.

It was my mother who found them, of course. I found the innocuous things, and the bizarre things,  the wonderful things – the pipe cleaners, the stash of pot, the robot – yes, the robot – and some terrible things – the suicide note from fifteen years ago, the agonized letters to my sister and I apologizing for his imagined failures as a father – but it was my mother who found these, these love notes from another time and another place, these pages that my father would have least wanted her to see of all his pages, all the pages of his story. We cried together, she and I, after she found them. We cried, and then I said all the right things about how that had been such a brief period, such a blip in a much longer history, and, too, how depressed he had been, what a mistake it was, how he had said so, how he had insisted so, and as I spoke it seemed to me – me, so spooked these days – that the very air rippled with tension and I wondered whether I was saying the right things, the truthful things. Had it been nothing? Had it just been a relationship borne out of his depression, a symptom of other problems, of deeper issues that had nothing to do with love? Or had it been more, something more, even for a moment?

Later, we found pictures of this woman. He had wrapped them in multiples layers of packing paper, and taped them up, tightly, and shoved them in a plastic shopping bag and stashed it at the back of his closet, under a bundle of old clothes, hidden, as though he couldn’t bear to be reminded of them, as though he very much wanted to forget them, but couldn’t bear to throw them away. My mother didn’t look at them. She turned away and said, trash them. Toss them in the dumpster. Trash them. And then she left the room.

I wrapped them back up in their paper and put them back in the shopping bag and tucked them back in the closet. I will trash them later, I thought. With the letters that I had stashed in my pocket. Later.

Later never came.

The pictures are still stashed in that bag, in the closet. I’ve been working around them, packing things away, taking things to Goodwill, sifting and sorting through the stuff of my father’s life. I’ve been working around them, pretending that they aren’t there, because I don’t know what to do with them. Do I throw them away? I can understand totally my mother’s desire that they be thrown away. I would desire that they be thrown away, if I were my mother, if it were the love of my life who had received such letters and retained the pictures of their author. I do desire that they be thrown away, or at least, that childish part of me that wishes to deny that part of my father’s history desires that they be thrown away. But therein is the rub: now that my father is gone (so suddenly gone, so absolutely gone), I recoil at the idea of denying any part of his history, any thing – any word, any image – that forms any part of the history that made him him. I don’t know whether or not he loved that woman. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether or not he loved her. She was part of his life for a short time and for whatever reason he chose to not erase her memory, entirely. So I feel – I think – that I should not erase her memory. For whatever reason. For whatever it’s worth.

So I have these pictures, and these letters, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to keep them, but it feels wrong, somehow, to just throw them away.

I have these pictures, and these letters, and I don’t know what to do.

(What would you do?)