Life’s dragons will shatter you

You must work to become whole again.

Ten years before my son died, he took a school trip to Costa Rica. In addition to sunburn, souvenirs, and crazy stories about the kind of mischief only high schoolers can dream up, he brought home worries of an inexplicable tiredness—a bone-deep exhaustion that dogged him throughout the trip. On bus rides, he slept through the scenery. On beaches he napped amid cavorting howler monkeys. When parties ramped up in the evenings, he escaped to bed.

Back at home, though, Kyle recovered. A straight-A honors student, he skied black diamond slopes, gamed competitively with friends, and walked his age in miles every year. He was on track for college, eager to pursue what he’d always wanted: a job that allowed him to build things. Big things. I told him to hang onto his dreams, no matter what life threw at him. “There’s always a way,” I said. “Just keep going.”

—

I was raised by a loving pair of cynics. They’d survived the Great Depression, war, financial crises, and—in the case of my mother—childhood abuse, seven miscarriages, racism, a baby who died, and a pregnancy that almost killed her. Keep your expectations low, my parents advised. Don’t tempt the fates. The dragons are out there. I was loud in my protestations: Life is good, I insisted. No matter what happens, I’ll keep going.

—

The first migraine struck Kyle on the soccer field. His coach insisted he keep playing, and by the time Kyle stumbled off the field, he was incoherent with pain. That night, we began a routine that would become familiar: dark rooms, cool cloths on his forehead, and me by his side until the migraine had wrung everything out of him and he could sleep. I called the doctor, who suggested an MRI to rule out anything unusual.

It turns out, we were just entering “unusual.” The MRI revealed a massive, rare, non-malignant brain tumor. Immediately after we received the results—just before a long Thanksgiving weekend—we struggled through another of Kyle’s migraines and the fear that if the tumor blocked any of the ventricles in his brain, it would kill him. First thing on Monday, we rushed to the pediatric neurosurgeon.

“The tumor is inoperable,” the surgeon said. “But Kyle is doing well. Academically, socially, physically. Thank your lucky stars and get on with your lives.”

Relieved, that’s what we did. Kyle went off to college. He told us about the occasional nighttime weirdness of horrific nightmares and waking up after falling from his bed. He wasn’t having seizures, the doctor assured us. He’d be incontinent. Probably just stress.

In the spring after Kyle’s first year in college, when he was back home, I witnessed him in the grip of a grand mal seizure. I called 911 and waited helplessly while the seizure shook him, Kyle himself clearly absent. When the neurological storm ended and he returned, he stared at me with wide, childlike eyes. “Did something happen?” he asked.

—

When I was little, my mother worried about poison ivy and pediatric cancer. Serial killers and salmonella. As a teen, I’d looked at the risks (no one dies from poison ivy) and the odds (a serial killer in our hometown??) and waved off her concerns. But a month after Kyle’s seizure, a wildfire burned our home to the ground. These two events taught me what my parents could not. That the dragons are real, and they will hunt you down. Lock your doors, and they find a window. Bar them at the gate and they dig under the ramparts.

—

Kyle’s seizures increased in severity and number, although they remained occasional. They happened at night; most times, Kyle would go “seizure walking” immediately afterward, falling into a fugue state in which he roamed the hallways of his apartment building, forlorn and lost.

Through all of this, Kyle exhibited a spirit of joie de vivre alongside an amazing work ethic. He hiked with his friends and surprised his coworkers with free lunches. He relished amazing his family at Christmas with gifts we hadn’t known we wanted, then couldn’t live without—like a set of Tyrannosaurus Rex salt and pepper shakers breaking up the solemnity of my very proper dining table. He loved pranks (showing up in a Thomas Jefferson costume) as much as he loved working hard and mentoring others at work. He was ever kind and generous and hopeful. And determined. In the post-seizure hazes, while coping with whatever injuries he’d suffered during the latest seizure, he kept going. He received his BS in structural engineering, then put himself through graduate school with teaching and research assistantships. He won a job at his dream company. Designed a bridge that went up in Oklahoma. Started work on the light rail expansion in Seattle. He met a woman, an attorney, and they began dating. He continued to walk his age in miles every year.

But the dragons hadn’t vanished. They’d merely hidden themselves, waiting their moment. In 2020, they reappeared.

On a Monday in mid-February, Kyle’s boss called to say that Kyle hadn’t shown up for work. He wasn’t answering texts or calls. My husband and I drove through a blizzard to our son’s apartment an hour away, hoping against hope that he’d taken the day off to ski and the message hadn’t reached his boss. Then we spotted his car in the parking lot. We forced our way into his apartment and found him cold in his bed. He’d died alone over Valentine’s weekend.

The boy who’d always gone on no longer could. And without him, my own life stopped.

—

My only son was twenty-seven when he died. He’d taught me how to laugh in the darkness. How to revel in the heat of his blazing intelligence. How to embrace a fierce love that would never diminish, even in death. How to keep going no matter what.

But after he passed, I collapsed into the sharp folds of a dark winter. I went insane with grief—a nighttime creature, haunted and haunting, watching the world through a dark mirror. My publisher extended my deadline, and I abandoned writing to pass hours in what had once been my favorite reading chair, sitting in the slanted cold of winter sunlight, my internal compass spinning as if I’d sailed into the Bermuda Triangle. I signed up for grief groups then never went. I bought books on bearing grief that I couldn’t bear to read. Poetry was manageable, as were phone calls from my family and most treasured friends. But this was the winter and spring of 2020—everyone had retreated from the world. I was barely conscious of the pandemic—I saw simply that people were dying, and the world was in mourning. It made perfect, if horrible, sense: This is what the dragons bring.

And yet. And yet. My son. Kyle had—through blinding headaches, debilitating seizures, and the knowledge that every time he closed his eyes to sleep, he might never wake—through all this he kept going.

Could I do less? Or would I let his death plunge me into a nihilistic darkness which would eventually consume me? What do we owe our dead? And what do we owe ourselves?

Slowly, I stirred. The winter within began to thaw as—outside—spring emerged in rushing creek water, the bright green blossoming of dormant aspen and elm, the birdsong of returning robins. The sun crept back into the northern sky, sunlight slanting longer, its color as rich as gold coin. In this beauty and riotous rush of life, I understood that while the dragons are always here, they are not our masters. And although we can’t protect ourselves or our children from them, neither should we submit to their darkness.

I accepted that I could—indeed, should—live. Even when my son could not.

I put aside my books on grief and opened Kyle’s last gift to me—a hardback guide to the world’s most amazing destinations. I began a list of places I wanted to see. I created a folder on my computer called—simply—“Life Project” and created a file: “Breathing for Two.” Since Kyle couldn’t go on, I’d go on for him.

In the four years since Kyle passed, I’ve written four crime novels and a spy thriller. I have wandered the souks of Morocco and gazed in awe at the tomb of Ramses II in the Valley of the Kings. I’ve climbed mountains in Colorado and ascended the Mount of the Temptation in Jericho, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. I’ve ridden a dahabiya down the Nile and stood soaped-up beneath a dead showerhead in a safari camp after an elephant broke the waterline. With awe, I lingered outside Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island and tried to fathom the strength that drove him to survive imprisonment and guide his country out of apartheid.

Now, at last, I understand what Kyle had always embraced: when the dragons knock you down, you must rise back up, whatever that means for you. In time, a weary trudge becomes a brisk walk, then a run, and finally a sprint toward the future. These days, I’m training to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. If the dragons have breathed their fire on you, I hope you’ve found your footing. And if you have, maybe I’ll see you somewhere along the trail.