Today is the second anniversary of the day Johnny died.
People have been very kind with their words and their "tiptoeing" around us.
Tommy woke up with an inflamed throat he's been developing for the past few days so I honored his seldom made request to allow him to stay home from school. Vitamin C, Omega-3 (fish oil), a dose of honey, tylenol alternating with ibuprofen and a few hours extra sleep and he is feeling better. Definitely school tomorrow.
Rick Carroll, brother of Chris and...(forget that litany...he has 13 brothers and sisters) emailed a saying that will stay with Tommy and me as long as we live: "When a loved one becomes a memory, a memory becomes a Treasure."
The thought then occurred that everyone at some time must put the past behind and look toward the future. That's not as simple as it sounds. Each experience you've had, each person you met was akin to a teacher adding something, for better or worse, to your life's education. Not progressing to the next "lesson" is where obsessions and other aberrations take form. So you keep a bit and leave a lot.
Of course somethings we must never forget: the horrors of the Nazis, 9-11, Bill Clinton letting our troops die for naught in Somalia, the evil hypocritical bastards hiding behind their positions as government officials or psychologists or clergy or peace or civil rights or animal rights activists, the demented acts of child rapists and murderers...you get my drift. If you are an evil, lying bastard, you are an evil, lying bastard period.
I truly understand the aboriginal hunter's prayer for forgiveness by the animal he's about to dispatch. I think it's more honest and realistic than the saying that we "must always forgive, but never forget." Some say that concept's origin is a play on the Biblical reference that in His forgiveness, God "forgets" our transgressions in that moment but never forgets what we are capable of in our imperfect human-ness. More likely it was some pious attempt to put an end to blood feuds between individuals, families, tribes and nations. It's a concept that always troubled me because for the most part I believe it's largely BS.
So there are persons and actions I will not forgive, nor forget.
On this day, I look back on what led up to Johnny's death in an effort to decide those memories that are to become treasures as well as those that are to be forgotten, forgiven and those for which I will do neither.
The search for Johnny's initial heart condition begins, for me, the night I woke up in a pool of my own blood.
I tend not to react as most do. The morning we rushed Johnny to Children's Hospital the first of many times, I was quiet and reflective. The night, more than a dozen years later when he was rendered a quadriplegic after his heart stopped and ambulances (two) arrived outside his mother's house, I watched in expressionless silence. When my mother died I displayed no outward emotion, a fact that a few idiots in my family grossly misinterpreted. So when I saw the spreading blood my reaction was pretty much a simple "What the F***?"
Johnny's mother was not forthcoming with information unless pressed...and then you had the option similar from choosing from a Chinese restaurant menu of deciding from the multiple explanations issuing from her of what was more or less accurate...most as it turns out were probably less.
Let me give you an example.
Six or eight months after Tommy was born, I asked her when plans for Tommy's Baptism in the church would be finalized. My sister, Elena, was to be his Godmother; her brother Dick the Godfather. I was brought up to believe a newborn should rarely leave the house before he or she was Baptized and that was at the latest within the first month or so after birth. As the weeks grew into yet more months from the designation of his Godparents, I was beginning to believe Ohio natives dwell in a universe separate from the rest of us.
So I pushed.
She blurted out the name of a friend who was an Amway distributor and apparently some sort of Elder in the Mormon or Mennonite or some such church. "He baptized him!" she said.
"No, he didn't," I replied. "He's not Catholic."
"I did it," she said in the next breath growing very agitated at having to come up with an answer other than the truth.
She must have forgotten that I went through 12 years of Catholic elementary and high school as well as four at a Jesuit college. "Sorry, but that only work's in an emergency if the baby's going to die."
She huffed off out of the kitchen leaving the question unanswered.
Some months later while she, the boys and their step sister, Emily, were on a trip to Ohio to visit her parents (I was not invited although sometimes I got the idea that her mother felt more comfortable around me than with her own daughter) I received a phone call telling me that Tommy was to be Baptized that morning with her sister, Jennifer, standing proxy for Elena. She said she didn't want to invite anyone from my family. Elena was in tears. My mother was furious.
Back to the night of blood-soaked sheets. When finally I discovered that she brought an STD (she completely failed to mention) to the marriage, I asked her about it. In rapid fire with one explanation quite literally following the other, she explained, "Oh, my first husband had the same thing!"
Oh joy. Somehow I did not feel a simpatico connection. I will say I found out much later he is quite different from the expletives included descriptions she used about him. In fact, nearly word for word, she painted me with the same accusations she used for him.
"Did he give it to you?"
"I got it from a JEW from New York I dated." She never mentioned a name, only that he was a "JEW" in capital letters.
That was quickly followed by: "I was raped by a date at gun point!" Different guy. She never mentioned his religion, only that he worked on Capitol Hill.
Interesting. So which one was it? She never answered. Although during the divorce proceedings she claimed that she did not know she brought anything of that nature to the marriage. So why identify ...oh, never mind.
I did a bit of google research through a variety of medical journals and found that one of the effects of this particular STD is a constriction in fetal blood flow. Fit the cause of the failure of Johnny's left ventricle to form. To this day I don't believe any study has been performed looking into the percentage of hypoplastic left heart babies who had parents with an STD. I believe more than a few lives would be saved if this vector is ever studied.
In my mind at least, that seemed a reasonable explanation for Johnny's initial heart condition versus a random or deliberate act allowed by a history-intervening God.
Still there were other acts, even other people who I believe played a role in the path toward Johnny's death.
(To Be Continued...)
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