The Man in the Cowboy Hat

Sometimes what you meant to write is overtaken by events. How can I not write about the bombing this week, but how can I write about it? It's so narcissistic: Here's how the bombing affected ME. The bombing affected me the way it affected everyone who wasn't touched directly: I felt shock and horror and compassion for the victims and anger at the as-yet-unknown perpetrators and admiration for the medical personnel who saved so many lives. Nothing to see here.

Before the bombing I'd been feeling sorry for myself, and feeling guilty for feeling sorry for myself. Quit yer whining, says the voice in my head. The voice, unsurprisingly, has a distinctly down-home drawl, and gets louder and more disapproving when something as terrible as the Boston Marathon bombing happens.

Of course to write that I was feeling sorry for myself is to level a criticism. A more value-neutral way to put it might be that I was in a dark place. And now?

*

I was watching the basketball game a few weeks ago when UofL player Kevin Ware broke his leg. I saw the replay, watched his leg move in a sickeningly unnatural way, but I didn't search the internet later for grosser pictures or more explicit angles. I don't mean to be one of those sanctimonious people who says it's wrong to look; I'm just squeamish. I always avert my eyes when I'm giving blood. But then without even realizing what I was looking at until it was too late, on Monday I saw a picture of an ashen-faced young man being wheeled from the scene of the marathon by a man in a cowboy hat. The man in the cowboy hat was holding Jeff Bauman's femoral artery in his hand to keep him from bleeding out. Bauman's legs were both blown off below the knee, jagged edges of bone protruding from bloody wounds.

The guy in the cowboy hat turned out to be Carlos Arredondo, a peace activist who'd lost one son in Iraq and another later to suicide. He and the medical personnel at the marathon and those at one of Boston's acclaimed hospitals saved Bauman's life.

Carlos Arredondo: what an amazing story. A you-can't-make-this-shit-up story. What does it feel like to attempt suicide after the death of your son, remake your life protesting against war, and then find yourself at the scene of a terrorist bombing and in a position to save the life of a young man not far from your son's age? Am I supposed to take from this that there is no way to know what you still have to contribute to the world?

Of course what it looks like on paper and how it feels to him are two entirely different things. On paper it has the tidy, redemptive feel of an O. Henry story, but of course actual lived experience is not that way. It must be an amazing feeling, saving someone's life, and in those circumstances, but his sons are still dead.

I try not to get caught up in the grief Olympics, though I think it's human nature to rank things and it's probably inevitable that if your child dies someone, somewhere, is going to tell you that they know how you feel and launch into a story about their cat, and you are going to be filled with inarticulate rage. Once I had a therapist who told an anecdote about a man who came to group therapy really conflicted about what car to buy. Her point being that we should not be in the business of judging, but only of listening. The car thing was a real problem for him, and I see what she's saying, but if I were the woman in that group whose nine year-old son was killed by a sneaker wave at the coast, I would have beaten that man with a shovel.

But I guess if I tell someone they are not allowed to feel bad about their choice of car because it is not as serious as that woman's grief for her son, eventually someone is going to tell me that I am not allowed to feel bad that my son died because he was not blown up in a bombing or shot in a school. And I am grateful, to the extent that I can be, that he wasn't. But it doesn't matter if someone tells me I shouldn't feel bad and here's why. I still feel. I can't help it.

Horrible things happen in the world, more horrible than what happened to me, and my son is still dead. What happened in Boston does not wipe away my grief or invalidate it. It's not either/or. It's yes/and.

Is the young man who lost his legs happy to be alive? Will he spend a long time grieving for the part of his life that was lost? Can't the answer to both questions be yes? Can there be a yes, but, or a yes, asterisk? He's lucky to be alive. He's also really breathtakingly unlucky. It's both.

One of the women who died was a Chinese grad student at Boston University. She was studying statistics. Her mathematically-minded classmates are having trouble accepting the way in which she was struck down, given the odds.

What happened to me was an ordinary kind of horrible. What happened in Boston was extraordinary horrible. It was public; it was violent. As my mother would say, it will force the grieving families to confront the nature of human evil. Of course I have had to confront the fact that Nature is indifferent and there is no God. I don't know why that's better. In each case, though, I think the only answering argument is the same: Carlos Arredondo.

*

When I was delivering Balthazar, I developed a fever. Since we still didn't know why he died, it was still possible that I had some kind of massive infection that had killed him. The nurse looked concerned, but decided to remove a few of my many blankets and check my temperature again later.

So that's it, I thought to myself. I'm going to die. I have an infection and it killed my baby and now it's going to kill me. I noted, without emotion, that I didn't feel much about it one way or the other. I felt no adrenaline surge, no desire to live. No wish to die, either. Just apathy. There's probably some protective biological reason that happens, but it doesn't line up very neatly with the idea of me as a fighter.

When the nurse took my temperature again, it was normal. There was nothing wrong with me, no danger to my life. No heroic measures were required of anyone. It was an ordinary delivery of an ordinary boy, with the one caveat.

Now that a year has passed, am I grateful for my life? Sure. The only thing worse than living through the death of your child would be not living through it.

*

A corollary to quit yer whining is aren't you over this yet? I have this feeling that I should wrap this up. I shouldn't bother anyone anymore; a year is long enough to impose all of this on other people. Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations or something? I'm pretty sure all of this makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and they'd feel a lot better if I let them believe that I was OK now.

The first night I went to the grief support group there was a man there who was marking the tenth anniversary of his son's death. He'd driven over from Beaverton and he said that he had noted that the trees next to the highway looked the same as they had the day his son died; they were the delicate green of early spring. I was appalled by the idea that I might still be at that grief group on my tenth anniversary, when at that moment I couldn't see how I was going to make it until May. And I see now that I probably won't be at the grief group on April 3, 2022. But as I drive, assuming I'm still around, I'll notice the budding trees.