E veryone is praying for my son Alex.
Everyone but me.
Alex is two days old. He has a respirator tube down his throat. Two transparent tubes full of watery blood descend from an incision in his right side. Another tube comes out of his stomach, leading to a little plastic jar that collects his stomach acid. An intravenous needle makes a red welt in his tiny wrist. A tangle of thin, black wires sends the story of his pulse, respiration, skin temperature, and oxygen saturation to a bank of beeping, blinking monitors.
Except for the artificial inflation of his lungs, he is motionless. He was paralyzed for this morning’s four-hour operation by the drug Pavulon, a synthetic version of curare. Nurses in maroon scrubs are clustered around his warming table in the intensive care nursery of Georgetown University Hospital, watching the numbers on the monitors. They look doubtful.
The scene ripples and tilts. I look up and try to focus by staring at a box labeled “Blunt Needles.” I have napped once in three days and I think I ate something yesterday. I will catch up when things calm down. I wish they would calm down soon.
On August 28, following premature rupture of her membranes, my wife Laurie underwent twelve hours of drug-induced, fruitless labor culminating in a Cesarean section. Alex, our first child, weighed six pounds, eight ounces and seemed fine, but when the nurse tried to feed him, the formula came back up. The diagnosis was tracheolesophageal fistula: his upper esophagus dead-ended at mid-chest. The lower esophagus came up from the stomach and was attached to the trachea, the windpipe. Left untreated, Alex would starve. He needed an operation immediately.
More X-rays and sonograms, doctors with stolid faces and awful news: Alex also has an extra half-vertebra that makes his spine twist and wend like a bobsled run. Alex has a heart murmur. Alex may have chromosomal abnormalities. Alex had an apparent seizure; we are checking for bleeding in the brain.
Laurie, who is tough enough to make genuinely funny jokes during a contraction, is at last wearing thin. We are trying to rest, sitting forehead-to-forehead on her hospital bed, when she speaks in an odd, high voice.
“Why is it,” she says, tears welling, “that people keep coming in and saying something else is wrong with our baby?”
That’s a good question, sweetheart. I don’t know.
Family and friends knock tentatively and peek in. Sick newborns are a particular strain on the emotional transmission — prepared for swift and breezy celebration, friends must instantly reverse gears and become consolers.
But they adapt. Flower baskets appear, cards arrive that say “Congratulations!” on the front and “Hope he’s OK soon” on the inside.
And they pray.
Family in Maine prays, friends in Oregon pray, whole congregations in the District say, “Lord, hear our prayer,” when the priest announces Alex’s name and condition. My wife’s sister, a master-of-theological-studies candidate at Virginia Theological Seminary, has mobilized the whole faculty and student body to petition God on my son’s behalf.
Certainly, I should join in. It seems reasonable, expected. My longtime alienation from organized religion is no excuse now — if there are no atheists in foxholes, one might expect there are no lapsed Catholics in intensive-care nurseries. Although the operation to connect Alex’s esophagus went well, the potential complications following major surgery on a two-day-old baby are many and horrible. Perhaps just a small, quick request, no words, just a thought. That’s the wonderful thing about prayer: it’s easy to sneak one in — just think it.
I look at him again. In his father’s opinion, for what that is worth, he is an extraordinarily beautiful child, with his mother’s auburn hair and huge, slate-colored eyes. A gorgeous baby so plumbed and sutured and wired he is almost obscured by a bird’s nest of tubes and cables. This sort of juxtaposition, the cold, metallic, foreboding machinery of medicine pressing and piercing the warm, defenseless body of a newborn, seems tailor-made to pull a prayer from a tired father’s soul. Only a monster would fail. . . .
I lean against the wall again and look out the window.
I cannot do it.
At three the next morning, Laurie is finally sleeping. I doze some, then wander from her room to the intensive care nursery down the hall. Alex came out of the anesthesia on schedule and was alert this afternoon, but now I find he is doing poorly — the nurse has boosted his oxygen concentration, and even so he looks drawn and gray, with a white stripe of dried spittle on his lips.
I had thought I was too tired to be scared anymore, but guess again. I walk back to Laurie’s room. I want to wake her and share the worry, but she’s had no more real rest than I have. So I sit in the dark and ask questions.
Does prayer work?
The cynical answer is that it depends on what you pray for. Pray for water to run downhill and it works every time. Pray for a coin flip to come up heads and it works half the time. Pray for a pig to sprout wings and it never works at all.
But I am not cynical. For my small mind to place limits on this infinite universe seems silly. Maybe anything is possible.
But if prayer does work, what should we pray for?
Suddenly, slouched in the chair, I’m remembering 1972, when I was seventeen, and my Volkswagen Beetle was broadsided by a Chevy Impala doing eighty-five miles per hour. My left thighbone snapped like a dry twig and I was thrown out the hole where the windshield used to be, wrenching my neck, smashing teeth and tearing off most of the skin on my left arm and shoulder. Reassembled with steel pins and wire stitches, I spent weeks in traction, six months on crutches, limped until I was nineteen.
Before the accident, I had been blessed with perfect health and was perfectly indifferent to it, but as I slowly recovered, I felt that to walk — even with my lopsided gait — was a priceless gift. When I found I could actually run, I felt suffused with grace. In the back of my mind, I knew it: getting pulped in that wreck and making the slow, difficult comeback was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Yet I would not have prayed for it.
Ten years later, and much more importantly, I went crazy for a while. Constant headaches, a legacy from the accident, drove me deep inside myself. For month after month, while I fought furiously to look and sound sane — if you think this is easy, try monitoring your own conversation for its sanity quotient — it seemed that I was looking at the world through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, and the fact that this is one of the clinically sanctioned symptoms of schizophrenia did not improve my spirits. I felt like a tiny man buried inside a great, fleshy, numb, man-shaped machine. I lost twenty-five pounds. I stayed in my room for ten days. I remember spending most of one night hoarsely chanting “suicide is not an option.” It was my dark night of the soul.
Then, slowly, my tiny self grew to fill the fleshy shape. And then it kept growing. After a long time, colors became impossibly bright, skies larger than they should be, beds warmer, beer colder, and my mind clearer. Best of all, I learned that independence is a sterile prison — being buried inside my own body and being pulled out with the patient help of Laurie and my friends was an unforgettable way to learn about how much we need each other.
Yet I would never have prayed to go through such a thing.
Destruction and renewal, terror and pleasure, isolation and communion; I see that in my life none has ever stood alone. Each has created and defined the other, just as “day” is a meaningless word without the nights that wrap around it and reveal its comparative light and warmth. At a deep level, I see that my body had to be broken to become whole, my mind shrunken with madness to become full-sized and sane.
I stare at the baskets of flowers on the windowsill. Would we have been better off — more blessed — if our baby had been born healthy? Should I pray now for him to, as the cards say, “Get Well Soon”? Would that be better for Alex, Laurie, me, the universe?
I wonder. So many times I had chased some streamlined, chrome-plated dream only to find that when I attained it my joy quickly drained away. So often I had run from sorrow, only to find that when I finally faced it I was kicked up to a new level of peace and understanding. The shadow of pain and the light of pleasure have their roots in each other; they cannot be teased apart. A prayer that denies the pain of this moment denies the pleasure of the next one.
The street lights outside pale as dawn comes, and I finally go to sleep.
Next to Alex in the intensive care nursery is a purplish baby who weighs two pounds and is the size of a quart jar. Julie, a nurse, is methodically whacking him with a cylindrical piece of pink rubber to loosen the mucus in his underdeveloped lungs. Behind her, nurse Mary keeps an eye on a newborn with severe pneumonia whose dusky blood is pumped through a baby-sized heart-lung machine. In the far corner, Paula changes the diaper of a rheumy-eyed preemie, yellow with jaundice, who is bathed with ultraviolet light to stimulate his antitoxin response.
In the weeks following Alex’s surgery we visit him here at least twice a day, and we get to know these nurses well. They are regular folks, the kind you would find in the bleachers at a Little League game or the express line at Safeway. They talk about husbands, boyfriends, movies, how babies in their charge are doing.
Even so, there is something about them that strikes me as familiar, yet unusual. I can’t quite place it.
Then, one afternoon, Mary is trying for the third time to find an accessible vein in Alex’s foot for intravenous feeding. The needle site must be changed every sixteen hours to prevent swelling, and there is no easy way to find a good vein in a small, pudgy, squirming baby. Now, at three weeks, Alex’s breathing has improved markedly, and he is proving it by screaming at a respectable volume as Mary jabs again. “I think that’s got it,” she says.
Then I see it.
They do not avert their eyes.
As a reporter, I have met other people like this: police, garbage collectors, prison psychiatrists, hospice counselors, coroners. They are the ones society officially designates to clean up after the parade. They are our removers of the darkness.
Without them, our world would be unrecognizable. Surely, no other society has dedicated itself so totally, nor succeeded so resoundingly, in evacuating darkness from daily life as has ours. The sick, the old, the murderous, the retarded, the insane, the dying, all are rendered invisible by our walled institutions, tended by the few of us who do not avert our eyes. These are the caretakers who make sure garbage vanishes miraculously from our back doors, excess populations of dogs and cats are gassed and buried, the river is dragged for the party of missing fishermen, and beef appears in supermarkets stripped of skin, drained of blood, and wrapped in clear plastic. They dispose of the placenta when we are born, empty our bedpans when we are sick, and fill us with embalming fluid when we die.
We gladly palm such jobs onto others, but there is a great paradox at work here. I think we are the losers in this system. We who crave only the light are the ones who keep our shoulders hunched and stomachs taut, fearing the day when the shadows of filth, sickness, and death will loom across the thin, artificial curtain we have drawn between light and darkness.
Worst of all, we are tormented by worry about exaggerated ills that never arrive. One night, for example, Paula tells me about the horribly disfigured babies that are sometimes brought into the intensive care nursery: “The parents are really afraid to come in and see it. But when they do, they always say the same thing: ‘It’s not as bad as we thought.’ ”
Darkness, when faced, is never as bad as we thought.
That is why people like Mary and Paula, people who arrange the pillows for hydrocephalic infants, who stand in the slaughterhouse blood, who live and breathe the stuff of our nightmares, project a groundedness, a sanity, a peace about the world and how it works. When it is part of your job to watch babies die, and some do die in the Georgetown intensive care nursery, you cannot pretend that darkness won’t have its due.
Above all, you learn what God’s mercy, the big mercy, really is: more than mere kindness. The Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton called God’s nature “mercy within mercy within mercy,” meaning that in this world the small mercies are wrapped up in the bigger ones. I show my mercy toward my screaming baby son by cuddling him; Mary shows hers by cuddling him at times, and poking him with that damned needle at other times. My mercy is made only of light; Mary’s is made of light and darkness and so it is larger and encloses mine. My mercy makes a small healing, hers makes a bigger one: Alex could live without my cuddling, but not without that needle.
A lesson sinks in after many hours in this long, antiseptic room of tiled floors, fluorescent lights, busy people, and brutal compassion:
To pray only for light is to pray only for tiny mercies.
As I write this, Alex is one month old and much improved. He is still in the hospital, and we must feed him by pouring Laurie’s milk directly into his stomach tube. But he is also nursing by mouth. Each day he takes less through the tube and more from the breast. One by one, the other tubes have been removed.
The seizure seems to have been an isolated event; his brain scan is normal. Already, Alex’s early darkness is yielding counterposed joy; not many parents have a chance to rejoice that their baby’s brain is not bleeding, but we did. The spliced esophagus, the twisted backbone, the burbling heart will be monitored as he grows. He will probably be able to eat like any other kid, but his back may require further surgery. Light and dark will come and go.
Writing this has made me very uncomfortable, because I sound as though I am explaining some great truth, and I am not. If you understand shallowly, as I do, that light and dark are inseparable, it won’t improve your life. If anything, it will make it worse. When Alex screams with pain, I not only avert my eyes, I also get angry with myself for averting my eyes, knowing that I am turning away from all of life. It is frustrating, infuriating, exhausting — the hell of the half-enlightened.
But there is a step beyond this. Once I saw light and dark as separate and unrelated, now I see them as dependent and alternating. I know that when we are plunged into darkness, it is only a matter of time before the light dawns.
But the final step is to love the darkness as deeply as we love the light, to love it even as we are swallowed by it. The Biblical injunction to “love your enemies,” which includes the “enemies” of disease and pain, is not a call to some sort of unnatural, tight-lipped, righteous tolerance, but an appeal to common sense. If our enemies provide the contrast that reveals our friends, how can we fail to love those enemies out of pure gratitude?
Still, we do fail. Our narrowly focused attention, which chops the world into mutually exclusive bits, has trouble grasping the beauty of this dance of opposites. Helping us to see this unity is, I believe, religion’s true mission.
So, what about prayer? Actually, there are all kinds of prayers. A prayer that asks for something, called a prayer of supplication, I now leave behind. But, together with my new family, I have a feeling I will find larger prayers ahead. I will not think my way to them — you cannot think your way anywhere — I will live my way to them. These will be the odd sort of prayers that never exclude, set conditions, or seek relief. These will be prayers that embrace the darkness, aware that it is essential and seeing what it has to teach us. These will be the paradoxical kind of prayers that ask, earnestly, pleadingly, for nothing at all.
Brad Lemley writes, “At ten months, Alex is doing wonderfully — sitting up, eating well, bright-eyed. He still has some weakness in his upper body, and we go to physical therapy for that once a week. He is the best thing that ever happened to us.”
— Ed.
Brad Lemley’s article originally appeared in The Washington Post Magazine last December (entitled, “My Baby Is Very Sick but I Can’t Pray for Him”), and has been reprinted in The Catholic Digest.
