A Yuletide Tragedy

[Elspode]

You've all known a kid like this one. Unruly, disruptive, ADHD, loud. He's the five year old you see walk in the door with his mother and you wince. The boy whose name is almost always shouted out, closely followed by the words "stop it!". Sure, he's a handsome lad, with a winning smile and the cutest manner of childish intelligent speech you've ever seen, but still and all, you wish he were somewhere else most of the time.

I know that's often how I felt about Conner. The few times our family watched him for his mother, our good friend, he left us worn out and bedraggled. If we were fortunate, nothing would have been broken before he left. The boy is nothing if not energetic; he is anything but obedient. Before yesterday, the word quiet was never used to describe him.

Today, he lay silently in the PICU at Children's Mercy Hospital as I held the hand of his sobbing mother while the ICU nurse suctioned out his lungs with a tube shoved down his nasal passages. I watched him snake it down his throat, and heard the hollow sucking rasping sound coming out of Conner's mouth. Conner's small body twitched and jerked with disturbing frequency as it lay on the bed, surrounded by an array of life support equipment resembling the sick bay of the Enterprise. It was involuntary movement...the repeated insertions of the suction tube elicited no choking, no coughing...nothing. I held his cold, cold little foot, and tried to will him to consciousness, tried to reach into him with my mind, to tell him it was alright, that he shouldn't be scared, that people were with him, that his mama was going to be right there.

There was no Conner there. There was only a small, outwardly undamaged shell of a little boy who yesterday fell through the thin ice of a small pond, and was trapped beneath it for an unknown duration. That his body continues to function is only due to the heroic efforts of the man and his friend at whose house Connor had been left while his mother went to her second day at a new, badly needed job. Jerry and Badger beat their way through the ice with their fists, their knees, their feet, smashing away at it until they were able to dive in and pull his lifeless form from the pond. They administered CPR and mouth to mouth until the EMTs arrived and took him to the nearest trauma center. Then, they stood by while the police interviewed them and considered whether or not someone should be arrested for neglectful homicide.

Those men now suffer horrific, undeserved, self-imposed guilt, constantly questioning how they could have prevented it, what they could have done better, sooner. Jerry's own two year old was the one who alerted them that "Conner is under the water". The children had wandered off together from an outdoor gathering of friends, somehow escaping the confines of a six foot chain link fence that not even the family dog could circumvent. It was that same two year old who, upon seeing the men working to revive him, looked at his approaching, terrified mother and said, "Conner's dead..."

Indeed, a whole family, a whole community of which I am a part is now looking inward, and wondering why. When I left, the ICU waiting room at CMH was filled to overflowing with Pagan clergy, friends and family, all trying to support the mother and share the burden of impending loss that the doctors assure us has already occurred.

Sometime, probably in the next day or so, a mother in Kansas City is going to have to make some terrible, terrible choices, as doctors pronounce Conner brain dead and incapable of surviving without life support. That mother is my friend. I am kin in spirit with her because of my own son's time spent in that same hospital some thirteen years ago. I know what she is going through, and I know that I was favored with a miracle in that my own son, while handicapped, is still with us.

How I wish I could conjure that same miracle for Conner. How I wish I could tell him to go ahead and run, jump, scream...break something.