I wake to my youngest child’s birthday. His fortieth.

I write little about David. Like a collared culprit, I blurt my excuses:

·      David is sick – with paranoid schizophrenia – has been since his mid-teens – and I’m loath to violate his privacy.

·      The facts of his case “are what they are” (that convenient conversational cachepot) – what more’s to say?

·      To discuss David’s woes is to misappropriate them as material.

·      Discussion of this topic obviates others. My kid’s misfortune may be – gulp! – the most interesting thing about me.

·      These daily outings mean to hearten – and there’s nothing about this ache – nothing – from which to eke the least glimmer of hope.

All true – and false.

I don’t write about David for the same reason I don’t touch live wires or expose flesh to flame: I am not brave enough. I no longer weep at his fate – tears dry – but still I writhe. What felled him is so wrong, unjust, inexplicable. This disease, which has no known cause or cure, typically attacks phenomenal male intellects (A Beautiful Mind is a truthful portrayal of this tragedy). One is well and then one’s not – why? What on earth can be done? Is there, oh is there, a God?

Curiously, though confession’s my vocation, I avoid this most consequential fact. Where, I taunt myself, is the lemonade to be made of these lemons!

T.S. Eliot had me in prospect when he wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” I can’t wrestle this quandary – I haven’t the strength; yet don’t I owe it to myself – and mission – to try?

Shame is a common response to senseless calamity. We regale the lucky and recoil from the luckless, likening others’ experiences to our own. Why mightn’t I enjoy the good fortune of Y? Happy thought! Likewise, why mightn’t I get whacked like Z? Don’t even go there!

What happened to David might to anyone. It was no one’s fault. Even if his genome had forecast his sickness, today’s science couldn’t have forestalled it. Reason knows this, but our dreams demur. It’s a parent’s job to protect their kid. David’s mom and I failed our boy, we don’t know how, but the shame hurts, haunts, harries.

And what of ourselves do we owe our injured? David receives the best institutional care available: in his lucid moments he knows this, I’m pretty sure. Jane and I visit him twice a year, at least, in far away, hard-to-get-to Vermont. Is that enough? No! But neither do I devote “enough” time to my other kids, grandkids, loved ones, vocation, you. Oughtn’t I be manning the barricades in our sickening civil war? Oughtn’t I…

Love lives in perpetual arrears. The more we love, the more we shortchange the objects of our affection. We can’t spend the same hour twice, dammit. Self-help gurus notwithstanding, there is no satisfactory “life-work balance.” We must rob Peter to pay Paul.

I rob David to pay – all my other claimants – me included. I am writing now (and writhing) – is this my highest and best use? Shortly I’ll be taking two days to visit David. Is that my highest and best use? Do I fritter time with Henry – or goof off? That, too. Is recreation restorative – or a dereliction? Whatever I’m doing, I am not doing something else. To hell with me!

I said earlier that “there’s nothing about this ache… from which to eke hope.” That’s not quite true. David’s torment has taught me humility and gratitude. There but for God’s grace go I. Lucky beyond tallying, I’ve been lavished with chance. I owe my world my best in return.