By Thomas Ukinski
All our lives, we bear loss and remorse, and sometimes remorse precedes loss, as effect outdistances cause, as our shadow is cast before us in the aftermost light.
When my son was a baby, we were staying in a Kansas City hotel, and, at dusk, we slipped away as he slept, stupidly confident he would be guarded by slumber. As we softly closed the door, we watched him, a small blond form on a raft-sized bed, the reticulated coverlet neatly folded across his tiny chest.
We strolled the circumferential blocks about the domino-shaped hotel beneath a clouded sky in brightened furrows like a membrane. We merrily reviewed the schedule of sights to behold.
A pale young man with frazzled black hair was approaching, and we felt his dangerous energy. We were abreast when he frantically pulled at his silver-stenciled sweatshirt as if to retrieve a pistol from his belt—
And our boy was awakened in the impervious darkness by amplified hallway chatter and slamming doors, as harsh as clattering dishes. He crawled to the edge of the bed, slipped off like a plummeting mountaineer, and tottered unsteadily across the musky carpet toward the bar of light at the bottom of the door. He did not cry at first, patient in infant wisdom, tentatively touching the fairly-tale glare on the ground. He began to make an anguished whimper, while, beyond the blackout curtains, Mommy and Daddy lay bloodied in the asphalt abyss.
—But the protective pall of God or chance had descended on us with the day’s enfoldment, and the youth passed on, his wrathful yearning conceiving other quarry.
When we entered the room, we panicked, for it seemed the bed’s expanse was empty, but our little one was still napping. We turned on the light, and his copper eyes opened, and he held out his arms.
The enormity of our ignorance evoked such a terrorized regret that we wept as we hugged him.
The resonance of that ordeal diminished, only to resound sixteen years later when he was borne by stretcher to the ambulance after an auto accident. We experienced this vision only from the news report. That evening he had not called, nor could we locate him. This was in the age before cellphones. We went to his high school play rehearsal, where we knew we’d find him because he was devoted to theater, and the bald-pated drama teacher looked at us aghast and asked, “Don’t you know?”
In the days thereafter, I escorted family and friends to the chiaroscuro of the ICU, where amid the metronymic pulsing of the vital signs monitors, he lay in a coma with a tube down his throat to keep him breathing. Tears trickled anew down my face each time I entered the unit.
We realized we had abandoned him again to the flimsy armor of a Chevy Nova against the frigid malevolence of winter and the treachery of a black-ice patch that slid him into the oncoming traffic lane, into a murderous collision of aggregate velocity. He survived with the war-wounds of a feeble memory, a left arm in contracture, and a straggling right leg. He could live alone but needed a caretaker at night, for in the event of a fire, he might be too confused to act.
Seven years later, he was on a visit to our small-town home, and we forsook him to his former bedroom but attended his sleep with a baby monitor, and we awoke to the sounds of his harsh breathing. We discovered him in the grip of a seizure, the result of scar tissue from his traumatic brain injury. On his bed, I held him as he trembled, begging God or Chance to save him as it had rescued the baby in the man.
At the time of the accident, the life-flight helicopter happened to be near, en route to the city, but now there was only the clumsy solicitude of a volunteer fire department that knew nothing of trauma or treatment. The ursine driver timorously piloted the ambulance the twenty-five miles to the hospital at a maddeningly leisurely pace. Meanwhile, our son’s beleaguered heart could sustain no more, and the ambulance, arriving at the emergency room, was bereft of sound, sight, and urgency.
At the funeral, amid the eulogies of friends and family, we wondered if his death at twenty-four had any more meaning than it would have had at seventeen or thirteen months. Or had the tragedy been hoarded by Paradise to punish him–and us–with greater pain and keener loss? His life telescoped backward, fate-upon-fate, to the child we’d cherished and neglected. We considered each day as a foreshadowing that we’d ignored in the absurdity of career and busywork. The security we besought at all costs had betrayed us. His upbringing and education had been rendered valueless, his future and family dissipated with his dying breaths. Every scolding, irritable response, and disregard cauterized our memories, instants and instances of love displaced by egocentric obsession. I thought of the day I had screamed at a three-year-old, enraged by the petty distress of job and finances, of the time we shamed an adolescent for an error in his cello audition for the city orchestra, of the night we watched a film and purposely mispronounced a word to hear him repeat the mistake, a toddler trusting in his parents’ honesty. These greater and lesser acts were part of one abiding cruelty that could never be atoned. And everything led back to the child left in a hotel room in the dark, a prey to malice or malign fortune, to a fire raving while he was trapped behind a door.
We looked to precious moments, to his noble qualities, for these alone would survive the passage to the afterlife, if such were more than desperate fantasies, and we hoped without hope that the journey through the eternal worlds would bestow more joy than could be found for us in the hours and years of our desolate penitence.