CREATIVE NONFICTION 63illuminating the darkest mysteries of the human
body. He is neither frightened nor angry. He
speaks. And he invites me to look even closer.
a crucifix hung above Alex’s hospital bed
like some lurid, anatomically correct model of my
brother’s tortured body, complete with abdominal
gash. On the first day after his surgery, in a plucky
gesture of nonviolent resistance, his friends decked
the cross in a colorful blanket of autumn leaves. But
by the second day Alex requested its removal from
his room altogether.
Soon after the crucifix came down, the hospital
chaplain came to check on Alex. Another profes-
sional making his rounds, taking the spiritual
temperature of the room, he hadn’t come to pass
judgment. He asked Alex how he was doing,
but Alex had no energy to talk, and the chaplain
didn’t push.
“I’m here if you need me,” he said, glancing
around the hospital room, crowded with medi-
cal equipment and a grim-faced assembly that
included my sixty-six-year-old father and me. My
father wore the same clothes he had since arriving
from Florida, a drab windbreaker and baseball
cap he left on even indoors. He looked drained,
distant, barely able to maintain eye contact from
behind his heavy bifocal glasses, whose upper and
lower halves offered equally disconsolate views of
what was happening to his son, and to him.
“You must be Alex’s father,” said the chaplain,
looking more like a college professor than a
minister in his corduroy jacket and button-down
shirt. The low murmur of pumps and monitors
helped mask the painful silence.
“Maybe you’d like to talk?” he asked. “We can
step out into the lounge.”
My father, seeing that Alex had dozed off again,
nodded, and the two of them headed for the door.
“I’d like to come too,” I said, and followed them
down the hall.
My father was a small man, a couple of inches
shorter than my mother and I, but big-hearted,
a charmer of little kids and grandmothers, of
waitresses, nurses, and nuns. He’d had his first
heart attack at forty-two and, besides the heart
attacks, over the next twenty-five years he
survived a life-threatening heart infection, heart-
valve replacement with that of a pig, emergency
quintuple bypass surgery, a defective pacemaker,
and finally congestive heart failure with its literal
enlargement of the heart.
That Alex lay dying of cancer at nineteen, as
my mother had at fifty-five, while my father
continued to beat the odds was an ongoing shock
to him and to the rest of us.
“Why Alex and why not me?” he sometimes
lamented out loud.
Had I ever wished I could give my life to save
Alex’s? Parents of gravely ill children seem to do so
as a matter of course. I never did. I loved life and
wanted to keep mine; Alex loved life and I wanted
him to keep his, too. Trading was not a viable
option, anyway. Each of us has a life to live—“the
given life, and not the planned,” as Wendell Berry,
Alex’s favorite author, wrote—and wishing it were
otherwise seemed pointless.
In a private corner of the visitors’ lounge on
Alex’s hospital floor, the chaplain and my father
sat face to face, and I pulled up a chair at my
father’s side.
“I know how hard all of this is for you,” the
chaplain began, “but what’s your biggest concern,
right now, today?”
Speaking the unspeakable, my father’s answer
came slowly, in his baritone voice and Hungarian
accent, which suddenly seemed thicker to me. “My
son. He’s so sick. He doesn’t have much longer.”
In the pause that followed, it was all I could
do not to rush in with words. But I followed the
chaplain’s lead.
“He’s a good boy,” my father continued, his
vowels lengthening, consonants hardening. “He
was always a good boy. But I am worried.”
The chaplain understood before I did. My father’s
biggest fear was that if his child did not receive
the final blessings of the church, despite having
lived a good life, he would be barred from heaven,
and thus prevented from joining his mother, who
waited there for him. In my father’s mind, this
would be a punishment worse than death.
Finally, the chaplain spoke. “Your son is in God’s
hands,” he said with reassuring authority.
My father stared down at his own pale hands
folded limply in his lap. The gold wedding band on
his left hand had joined him to his new wife back
in June, but it must also have reminded him of the
wife he had lost, the mother of his seven children.