MY SON LIAM was born ten years ago. He looked
like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round as a cucumber on
steroids. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in
his heart. You need four rooms in your heart for smooth conduct through this
vale of fears and tears, and he only had three, so pretty soon doctors cut him
open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour while they made
repairs, and then when he was about eighteen months old he had another surgery,
during which they did more tinkering, and all this slicing and dicing worked,
and now he’s ten, and the other day as he and I were having a burping contest
he suddenly said, “Explain to me my heart stuff,” which I tried to do, in my
usual Boring Dad way, and soon enough he wandered off, I think to beat up his
brother, but I sat there remembering.
I remember pacing hospital and house and hills,
and thinking that his operations would either work or not and he would either
live or die. There was a certain clarity there; I used to crawl into that
clarity at night to sleep. But nothing else was clear. I used to think, in
those sleepless days and nights, what if they don’t fix him all the way and
he’s a cripple all his life, a pale thin kid in a wheelchair who has Crises?
What if his brain gets bent? What if he ends up alive but without his mind at
all? What then? Who would he be? Would he always be what he might have been?
Would I love him still? What if I couldn’t love him? What if he was so damaged
that I prayed for him to die? Would those prayers be good or evil?
I don’t have anything sweet or wise to say about
those thoughts. I can’t report that God gave me strength to face my fears, or
that my wife’s love saved me, or anything cool and poetic like that. I just
tell you that I had those thoughts, and they haunt me still. I can’t even push
them across the page here and have them sit between you and me unattached to
either of us, for they are bound to me always, like the dark fibers of my
heart. For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed
as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time.
The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. What we want to be
is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that’s why we have these relentless
engines in our chests, driving us forward toward what we might be.
Eventually my son will need a new heart, a
transplant when he’s thirty or forty or so, though Liam said airily the other
day that he’s decided to grow a new one from the old one, which I wouldn’t bet
against him doing eventually, him being a really remarkable kid. But that made
me think: if we could grow new hearts out of old ones, what might we be then?
What might we be if we rise and evolve, if we come further down from the
brooding trees and out onto the smiling plain, if we unclench the fist and drop
the dagger, if we emerge blinking from the fort and the stockade and the
prison, if we smash away the steel from around our hearts, if we peel the
scales from our eyes, if we do what we say we will do, if we act as if our
words really matter, if our words become muscled mercy, if we grow a fifth
chamber in our hearts and a seventh and a ninth, and become as if new creatures
arisen from our shucked skins, the creatures we are so patently and brilliantly
and utterly and wholly and holy capable of becoming…
What then?
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