There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.
Albert Einstein

	In the Name of the Father, Part One ©2003 David Boyne

I awoke his mother, asleep with me in the next room, and in one flowing motion she was up and awake and rushing to her son and his unnaturally strained calls to her.

She gathered 5-year old Jack in her arms. She told me that it was an asthma attack. And a bad one.

Before that night, I had no experience with asthma. I did not even think of it as a disease, but as a nuisance easily controlled by over-the-counter concoctions being endlessly pedaled on television. I did not understand that as recently as my grandfather’s time, asthma was an indiscriminate killer of adults and children.

As I drove the three of us to the emergency room, the darkness held back by the beam of headlights felt like an ocean wanting to crush us under fathoms of blackness. Hearing Jack bleat, cough, gag, and strain for a clear breath, made my own throat hurt each time I swallowed. Jack whimpered, frustrated for just one deep breath. Yet, he was still a boy of five, sleepy, crying, stunned and straining to simply breathe—but he was also assured. He was in his mother’s arms.

When I was a teenager I would sometimes stay awake for as long as I possibly could. After a long night of partying, or a late-night movie, I would realize that I had been awake for nearly 24 hours. So I would decide to stay awake. Sometimes it was easy. Circumstances, maybe a job to go to, or a class that could not be safely cut, carried me through a second day without sleep. The restless urge to go outside, to be with hyperactive friends, would carry me into a second night. We would drink beer, then later, coffee, and we would drive the backcountry roads and through the deserted town centers of coastal New England, talking, talking, talking. And for long stretches of time, saying nothing. Sometime, maybe a handful of hours shy of a third full day without sleep, I would crawl into bed, my body aching as if I had been beaten up, and I would fall into a fitful sleep. It would take days to recover, to again feel in step with the people around me, the scheduled hours of school, work, television, the separation of day and night, the border marking the day from the night, one day from the next. And that lingering dislocation was what I liked most.

I sometimes hear people say that teenagers have no understanding of death, and believe themselves to be immortal, indestructible. I wonder if these people thought deeper—remembered deeper—would they still say this? All of my teen years I was acutely aware of death. I remember being stunned by the truth of my inherited, inescapable mortality. I still am. The only difference between then and now is that then, the understanding was new to me, and I raged against it. When the young first confront the insult of death, what else is there to do but rage against it, taunt it, prod it, handle it, draw it close before dancing back from it?

When we are young we ache for an urgent purpose to expend our one life on. And the younger we are, the more we live in the present. Every encounter is new and must be lived through, sometimes fought through, if experience, alternatives, and antibodies are to be gained.

That night in the emergency room of a small hospital in Portland, Oregon the doctor was distant. He did not seem to hear Jack’s mom tell him which medications had proven useless allies in Jack’s struggle against asthma. He then started to prescribe those same medications. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was simply doing what he had spent years being trained to do. Maybe he saw Jack not as a boy struggling for each breath, but as an equation with a few blanks that had to be filled in. Once the equation was balanced, Jack would breathe without pain or struggle, and live.

Jack’s mom stood beside her son as he lay on the examination table for hour after hour, as much to shield him from the doctor as from the illness. Jack took her familiar presence for granted. Even as he strained for each breath, he looked around the hospital room, a curious observer in a strange, new world. He watched the doctor and the male nurse, the other patients, mostly very old people with brown paper skin who stared blankly into space. He said nothing, and would only nod a yes or no to his mother’s or the doctor’s few questions. There was a quiet in him, a conservation of his energy, a certainty, even when a seizure of gasping overcame him, and wracked his body. Jack seemed wholly absorbed in watching something that was in the room with us. I could feel it, but only Jack could see it. His eyes were bright and alert with natural curiosity.

Near dawn, Jack began to breathe easier. In the earliest daylight, the sky above like oil and blood in dark water, we drove home.

Jack was asleep, breathing loud, but easily, as I carried him into the house. He slept until late afternoon. When he awoke, I asked him if he remembered what had happened in the night. He said, “We went to the doctor.” He was frowning, distracted, distressed that he had slept through all the morning cartoons on television. But a moment later as he looked over the hundreds of Lego blocks strewn across the floor of his bedroom, he asked me, “What should I make?”

Before I could answer, he was already on the floor, at work.

I stood in the doorway, watching a 5-year-old boy focused, concentrated, and entranced by the work of making, of creating.

Through the windows of his bedroom, I saw leafy trees swaying in the wind.

Off balance, lightheaded from the lack of sleep, I began to feel that the two of us, and the very house we were inside of, were spinning through an endless cold blackness of space.

It is only by an unimaginable chance that our world circles just close enough to and just far enough from a single, constant star.

And that makes everything possible.

For a long time I watched Jack playing on the bright day after the dark night when he had claimed his place in this precariously balanced world.

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