While on a Mother’s Day walk that was supposed to relax and restore us, a dog, a toddler’s slippery raincoat and my fallible grasp added up to our three-year-old falling and hitting his head on the pavement. He landed butt first but the momentum took him back and there was a sickening crack. The split second it took played in super slow motion. He’s fine, but for a week I played that video in my head hundreds of times, physically touching the back of my head and wincing on long drives thinking about what could have happened. We’ve done stitches and emergency room visits but your noggin is your noggin. If this could happen, what infinite number of bad things could happen next?
As a kid in the 70’s, we worked hard to tune in Boston UHF TV Channel 38 to get the Bruins games (Millenials, just play along). We took turns going into the attic and moving the TV antennae around while listening for yelled instructions from my dad or brother from the first floor. We rejoiced in clarity and suffered the fuzziness.
As the tragic events over the past year began to swim into, and speed-date, with my freshly- enhanced fears — Sandy Hook Elementary, the Boston Bombing and Moore, OK — I realized I follow a pattern as these news events wash over me. I initially moved my internal antennae around, as if back in my parents’ attic, to tune into the crisis with maximum clarity — putting myself in the shoes of those affected, until it hurt. A few days later, I would unconsciously start tuning out as work, Little League or family demanded. I felt guilty about the tuning-out part until I realized that’s our survival technique – unlike the Bruins games, we can only stand so much clarity around tragedies and that fuzzy signal serves a practical purpose — it cushions us enough to move forward.
A week ago, on one of those long drives, I got a call from a good friend, a father of three mostly grown kids, we talked about my son’s fall and how it was haunting me. He assured me that he can think back on dozens of those moments and that all parents have them. I knew that intellectually, of course, but it took a friend’s voice to get me over this hump and connect me, in a comforting way, to the broader parent brother and sisterhood.
I’m not equating a child’s fall with death and destruction but, as a traumatized dad, I offer a connection. In all of these terrible tragedies like Oklahoma, just like an every-day accident, what we can do after the fact is limited. Awful things happen in an instant and, as much as we wish it away, there will be pain. A few of us will be in position to call a doctor, offer first-aid, send a donation, or give blood. All fine things. But our absolute minimum responsibility, as human beings, is to make sure that these victims and their family members never, never, ever feel that they are alone in their pain and sadness. Second responders can be as important as the first and we all have that opportunity.
That humans are terribly vulnerable is our curse. That we are unceasingly, indefatigably willing to be there for one another in the dark hours is the best proof of the spark of divinity that resides in, and connects, each one of us. And that’s the sum total of my religion.
