An Audacious Act of Alchemy

Four years ago at this hour in this room my stepson, Danny, died after his long fight against leukemia. The sports bottle from which he drank water for the last time that morning, and the Starbuck’s container from which he sipped the hot chocolate he requested that morning, remain on the window sill where they were when he left. Now unused but always present, they’re among the many reminders of the change that occurred in this room on that day.

Each year on this date I come into this room from 6:50 to 7:10 in the morning. It was in that window of time that Danny peacefully slipped away, surrounded by his mom, brother and stepdad. There was no struggle; no pain; no distress. It was so quiet that we don’t know the precise moment. But we know that life changed for all of us in that moment. The change is so profound that I cannot capture it in words. I can write about it; but I cannot write it.

This change settled over us almost immediately. We were altered at the cellular level as if exposed to nuclear radiation. In that intense heat and light, some things were burned out of us; other things were forever softened; other things became tempered steel. It was as though a revised guide to the universe had been handed to us by Dan’s departing spirit.

For example, later that day, out of a new-found clarity, my wife said, “There is no hell.” She explained that if God is a father, as so much of the world proclaims him to be, then no parent could or would, under any circumstance, send their child to hell after death, no matter their age at death, no matter the content of their life. The idea became instantaneously inconceivable to this woman who had been raised a Catholic and spent most of her adult life as an evangelical Christian. Hell had been part of the teleology and theology of her life. In an instant it became dust under her feet, rendered meaningless by the rending of a veil that allowed her to reach through, from here to there, and touch truth firsthand.

An example for me is that every day I wear a white wristband from The One Campaign, an organization dedicated to fighting extreme poverty and AIDS. Extreme poverty means living on less than $1 a day. The campaign focuses on the almost 30,000 children who die every day, one every three seconds, from AIDS and the effects of extreme poverty. That is ten times the number of deaths on 9/11; ten times the number of children who die from cancer in the U.S. each year. Every three seconds, minute after minute, hour after hour, a mother, father, brother or sister experiences what we experienced in this room four years ago. But, for so many of them there is nothing even remotely peaceful about it; the moment is filled with horrific struggle, pain and distress.

The death of a child is the greatest loss the world can suffer. It’s the loss of innocence; the loss of virtue; the loss of unrealized potential; the loss of magic; the loss of inventiveness and creativity; the loss of hope for a better world; and the loss of following generations who would have carried the imprints of that child. We mourned all 168 who died in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, but we remember first and foremost the 19 children who died in the Murrah Federal Building daycare center. Appropriately, the National Memorial on that site refers to “those changed forever”. Indeed they were.

The death of child has the power to unite people because it is a shared suffering. Those who experience it, see it and feel it in almost identical ways. Look into the face of a grieving mother in New York City, Oklahoma City, Baghdad, Kabul, London, Hiroshima, Beijing, Moscow, Sydney, Guatemala City, Caracas, Calcutta, Kigali, and any village in Darfur and you will see the same pain. We may not be able to agree on countless other matters of geopolitics, economics, religion, ethics and morality, but we can all agree that children should not die from causes that can be prevented.

Children should not die.

But, when they do, the wake left behind them is unlike any other for it not only rolls across the surface of our lives, it rolls to the depths and it swells in power. No matter how powerless we may have felt at that moment, we are suddenly empowered to move, to leap as it were, to a new place in time and space. We are altered beings in an altered state. For a while, we can feel trapped somewhere along a line that runs from utter immobilization, through frantic memorializing, to an aimless wandering. But deep under the surface, a new energy waits to be realized.

It is the realization that children do not die.

They remain, in some mysterious way, as powerful in our lives as we were powerless in theirs. It is some kind of cosmic compensation in the core of our being. These so-called “kids” seemingly call us to come to a better place, not in some version of heaven, but in an altered version of ourselves. They who were taught have become the teacher. They who were led have become the leader. They who suffered have become the healer. In an audacious act of alchemy, they have become us and we have become them, and perhaps for the first time we are introduced to our real selves. We are called to return to who we were on day one – a child.

And he said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven…Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

And all God’s children said, Amen.

Lead on, Dan.