A Rephlection

I took Phin to the Jacksonville Zoo a few days before he went into the hospital back in March. 

His sisters were both sleeping over at their grandparents' house, and Neesha wanted to go to Jacksonville anyway so that she could look for a new couch at IKEA. Wanting no part of that and eager to compensate Phin for his having gotten left behind on the grandparents sleepover thing his sisters were doing, I suggested that Neesha drop us off at the zoo for a few hours. She agreed. She waved goodbye to us in the parking lot and reset her directions for the furniture store. We wished her luck with the couch, smeared on some sunscreen, and headed off to visit the animals. 

We did not know at the time that Phin was in mortal danger, that he was dying in front of our eyes, that he was very close to death. There were signs. We missed them. We told ourselves that his paleness and bruising was the result of a run-of-the-mill iron deficiency. We told ourselves it was probably no big deal. Less than a week after our zoo adventure, we would visit his pediatrician and learn that it was not a run-of-the-mill iron deficiency. Shortly after that, we would learn that more than a third of the white blood cells in Phin's body had already been replaced by blasts. That was the moment we learned that the emperor of all maladies had come for our little boy. 

Phin and I took many photographs during our trip to the Jacksonville Zoo. Occasionally, one will pop up in the screensaver app when the television in his hospital room is inactive. I always get a chill. In one photo, Phin rides atop my shoulders to get a better look at a capybara, his face bathed in white light, his outline slightly blurred and gauzy. Surely, I must have accidentally slid the camera into portrait mode, and this is a trick of aperture, I tell myself. This is merely an out-of-focus picture, not a snapshot of Phin fading away. 

In another photo, flanking Phin in the negative space where his mother or sisters would usually appear, I can almost make out the form of the silent companion who accompanied the two of us to the zoo. Our complacency paid its admission, and for every moment that my son and I shared that day, it was there, too, the interloper whose name is so dreadful and terrifying that even Phin's pediatrician could not bring herself to speak it aloud as she wept and sent him to the hospital. Where there are wrinkles in the fabric of the t-shirt stretching across his shoulder, I see the phantom hand of a shadowy figure gliding at his side, waiting for its moment to quietly guide him away. In my mind, I hear it whisper, Soon...soon....

I must have sensed a looming threat that day, even though it remained unidentified. I was on high alert. Never before had Phin and I ventured anywhere so crowded and so far from home, just the two of us. Child of the pandemic, he had spent most of the time since he learned how to walk charging down less populated and more familiar trails. At the entrance, we received our wristbands and our map, and I knelt down beside him. 

"Listen buddy," I said, "if we get separated, I want you to meet me here, okay?" I pointed to a giant metal statue of a giraffe. "Come back to this place and wait for me, and I will find you." 

Phin looked unsure about this--possibly a reflection of my own skepticism of my plan. I quietly slid the tracking device my brother gave me for Christmas out of my wallet and slipped it into his pocket. 

We walked around looking at animals for a while. Eventually. the topic of being lost came back up. 

"I don't know how to go back to where we're supposed to meet," Phin said. 

"Oh," I said. "Yeah, I didn't really think that part through. You'll probably need to find someone who can help you get back there. There are lots of people like that here. Do you know how to recognize them?"

Phin nodded and pointed to a gift shop worker, a sanitation worker, a zookeeper. 

"Good job!" I said. "Those are people who can help you if you get lost here. There are probably way more of them, but those are the obvious ones. And don't worry because at the same time you're looking for me, I'll be looking for you, and I'll never stop looking for you until I find you." 

Phin smiled at that, and we high-fived, and down the path we went once more. It turned out that we didn't really need to have the "if we get separated" talk that day. He never went very far from my side. After a half an hour or so the fatigue seized him and he wanted to be carried. A little bit after that we stopped for a snack and he fell down and instantly got an enormous bruise. I helped him get up, got him dusted off, and sat him back on my shoulders. And so we headed out to see as many more animals as we could--me walking, Phin riding, and the shadow of death gliding silently along behind. 

Writing this now in the darkness of Phin's hospital room, with him sleeping peacefully just a couple of feet away, it is hard for me to imagine being separated from him. We spend most of each day and every other night in the same space together. But he is once again entering that perilous time that follows the chemo infusions. His white blood cell and platelet counts will crater, and he will be at his weakest and most vulnerable. It is the period when he must be watched the most closely, lest some pathogen take hold of him and spirit him away. Who knew that we should fear this--that the cancer retreats but the danger increases? Or perhaps we knew but did not understand? There is so much in leukemia land to learn and to relearn, and there is so much to fear.

But I think of that last trip to the zoo almost every day, not only when the pictures pop up, because to me it feels like I am exploring this disease with Phin, that we are exploring it together, that we are still only very close to the entrance, that we are once again not alone.  

I feel like I am saying to him every day, "Yes, Phin, yes, this place is strange and scary, but look at all the people who want to help you! Can you recognize them? Look at everyone who has followed you in here! They all want to keep you safe. They have come so that you know that you are not alone. Some of them you already know very well, and some of them you haven't met yet. Some come from close by and some come from afar and some pray in ways you recognize and some speak your name with prayers in languages that you do not understand and some do not pray except for you and some do not pray at all but stand shoulder to shoulder with those who do in your name. You will know them by what they have carried into this place for you--money, mercy, toys, time, food, coffee, equipment, clothes, work, sweat, blood. Yes, some have given away their own blood, my son. Their own blood. Because they thought you might need it." 

And I discovered a place near the entrance of leukemia land that we can meet. 

It happened by chance. I was lying next to him in his hospital bed one morning just after he was diagnosed. Phin was asleep. I hadn't slept. I was watching the early light splash the room in dishwater shadows, listening to the clicking percolation of his IV machine, and trying to distract myself from the ache in my heart by imagining all possible futures where my son was still alive. 

He was sleeping curled up against my chest like a baby. He coughed and his breathing quickened, and I remembered a tip I'd read in some parenting book long ago about how to get your newborn to bond with you through synchronized breathing. I'd tried it on all three of my kids when I used to put them to bed when they were babies and I never noticed any results whatsoever.

But for some reason I tried it again with Phin.     

     

I closed my eyes, sped my breaths up and made them shallow like his. Then I gradually slowed them down. To my surprise, his breaths slowed down in pace with mine. 

Suddenly, the IV machine noise was gone. The light in the room, the shadows, the room itself--everything vanished. We drifted in a place without color or smell, without texture or taste, without blood or bone. All that remained was a song played on air above the soft metronome of breath. 

Only that, and one thought: 

Phin, if we ever get separated, I want you to meet me here, okay? Come back to this place and wait for me, and I will find you.