And at light's end...

He’s only 25 years old. My daughter’s age.

But he’s dying, and there’s nothing I, just one of his doctors, can do to stop the dying.

We’re talking a good kid, a kid until March just living his life.

A kid not unlike most 25-year-olds.

Not unlike my daughter, my own 25-year-old daughter.

Hanging with friends. Living. Loving Iowa’s Hawkeyes. Never thinking the inevitable. Until three months ago, when a foot drop signaled, not just a problem, but the inevitable.

His tumor, his glioblastoma, is right now doing what glios do.

Making his brain its brain.

Short-circuiting everything that makes any 25-year-old a 25-year-old, let alone anyone, anyone.

But his smile.

His smile makes you think that tomorrow could truly still be tomorrow.

With all the promise of another day.

Another day to go to classes.

To text friends. To catch a round of ultimate Frisbee. Complain about cafeteria food. Wonder who that girl is. Whether she might be his.

But the boy, this boy, is dying.

And this morning, this boy—and, Lord knows, he’s still but a boy—curled to half his height in the bed, so soundly asleep after radiation that I cannot wake him, his shaved head the only glimmer in the darkness of this, his room, too likely his last room.

“I don’t get to make the rules of the world,” I tell him, one hand on his, the other on his shoulder. “If I did, you wouldn’t be here…you’d be doing what my own kids are doing. You’d be just twenty-five…doing what 25-year-olds do…”

Again, that smile.

That smile, in that darkened room, even if then just half a smile, a night-light from the door to his bed.

And, at light’s end, this boy, curled in that dark around this, his unwelcome death…


© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon