Some dear friends of ours are waiting to pull the plug on their four month old son. Heck, by now, they might have done it already. Last night, while I was reading a bedtime story to my three year old daughter, the phone rang. Since I was busy, and since I had recently returned from a long and unpleasant trip to the grocery store with her, and since I was very eager for her to get to sleep, I let the answering machine pick up. After I had done my fatherly duty, I checked the messages.
The last message was from our friend, Amy. Her shaky, weak voice explained, matter of factly, like the physicist/mathemetician she is, that Nick stopped breathing during his nap yesterday. They suspect he was without oxygen for 40 minutes before a) the babysitter discovered the problem and b) the paramedics arrived. They managed to get a pulse eventually, but the doctors at the children's hospital determined his brain damage was massive. Only a ventilator was keeping him alive as of 22:00 last night. They were keeping him alive so friends and family could say their goodbyes. Nick's three brothers and sisters (ages 7, 5, and 3) said their goodbyes sometime last night.
Another friend of ours, a psychiatrist, said he suspected they were keeping the child alive so that everybody could say their goodbyes and so the parents could get used to the idea that their child was dying. Do you ever?
My wife and I, after checking about 20 times to make sure our child was breathing in her bed, sat around in shock last night. How do you go on after this, if you are the parents? Granted, they have three other children, so they kinda have to go on. And death isn't like ripping off a band aid, stinging for a moment and then forgotten. They will be finding toys, clothes, and other reminders of Nick for months or years. The mother was still breastfeeding. She'll have immediate, painful reminders in the form of rock-hard, leaking, sore breasts. We, far removed from the misfortune, shake our heads and thank the gods it ain't us. Which is a terrible thought, but one does think it.
So everybody will be sitting around, staring at their phones, waiting for that awful shoe to drop. But poor Amy and Dan... their wait will be infinitely worse. As a language pedant, I dislike it when people misuse words like "infinitely" -- by which they mean "a whole lot" -- when the thing they are describing is most certainly finite. ("The fishing is infinitely better on this lake than at that one.") But in this case, I think it works.
Sad.
Update