IT’S ONE DAY A YEAR

I lay on the couch, a sharp pain forming in my back, exhausted from the past few days. It was about 6 in the early evening 31 years ago, and TLW (The Little Woman) was showering, as I had done. Spending three days in a waiting room, sleeping on chairs was hard, but we needed to be near our son. The white foam coffee cups we had piled up only memorialized the time we spent in North Shore University Hospital, little Joseph sick and getting sicker.

We wouldn’t and couldn’t admit to what was in the back of our minds: the thought was too horrific. Every little turn and event we tried to make positive, that this time he would begin to heal. The doctors and nurses would come with something new, something different and it would give us hope, only to watch it dash our hopes.

I had wandered along the corridor in the children’s ward and on the pay phone was this woman, crying that they had lost their child, and I thought to myself how lucky I was that I still had mine. TLW and I were on a ship being tossed in a tempest, the sails were ripping and the water was crashing against us, the lightning so strong and powerful, it was deafening. I kept wondering how my other kids were, and what my wife’s state was. I was barely hanging onto the mast, blinded, feeling cold and lonely and still with a little hope in me.

The nurses told us to go home that morning, to get some rest, to eat something decent and come back tomorrow. I remember the ride home, as we discussed the events of the past three days. Turning off exit 60 of the L.I.E., I looked at the horizon and saw the clouds that were sweeping across the sky in the early morning dawn, the sun just ready to rise.

After a day with my parents, my sister Mary Ann, Joseph’s godmother and brother-in-law Dennis his godfather, and some wonderful neighbors, we sat and talked all day. The godparent’s went to visit him and came back to the house. Then everything settled down, they went home and we waited for the next day.

The Sunday before: TLW called me from the hospital while I took care of the kids and told me the bad news, that my son would not last the week, a crushing phone call that left me bleeding inside. We still weren’t even sure we knew what was killing him!

So that night on the couch, the Sunday’s call kept replaying in my mind. Then the phone rang, and I answered it. The doctor, an Indian or Pakistani accent to him, asked if we wanted to allow him to die or to continue to fight, and to please come down immediately. I was in shock and couldn’t think straight, and TLW was numb too, so she called her brother to take us down to the hospital.

As we climbed the steps to the ICU where Joseph was, a robed priest raced by us, flying through the doors, his white rope flinging wildly as he climbed and ran into the corridor that we were heading to. As we entered the doors I could see the nurse who cared for him covering him and sobbing, the priest leaving. My son's arms were lying outside the bed sheets and all the intravenous attachments from his forehead, arms and legs were gone, like he was healed, sleeping a deserved sleep. It seemed so strange to see and I felt a strange relief in a way. The doctor came out and took us into her office and talked to us. She asked if we wanted to give his organs away, and the thought revolted me, here I had just lost him, and she was asking me such a question! Maybe I should have, and it may have saved someone else from the anguish and pain we were feeling, but I couldn’t think that way, I was too much into the shock and horror of it all. But we sat in her office and I recall being there just a few short months ago, in fact it was the day after Thanksgiving, that Friday she told us he had suffered a seizure. It was the beginning of a horror that would last through two hospitals and two months time.

Every year, I spend 361 days cruising through me life, then one day a year, the breaks come screeching as I come to a halt. That is today. Today I will go to his grave and then to a little garden I built in his memory that sits next to the house and remember his short life.

One of my regrets in life is that I did not stay with him that day.