Many years ago one of my brothers once asked, "what happened in the room". The room of Matt's last days he was talking about. For a change had occurred, but it wasn’t until years later I realized what it was. It seems it began a month before the last days. Two months earlier, just after Christmas of 1990, Matt was admitted with a lung infection. That night I watched as the situation deteriorated and the next day he was put on a vent. (A tube down his throat that breathed for him.) A few days later he was making headway on the infection, when he came very close to coding, something, with the all surgeries and months of hospital stays, he had never done before. His kidneys started shutting down and we would have to wait it out, until they started up again.

There is a room down the hall from the ICU where parents sleep. Sometimes in the middle of the night a nurse would come in searching for someone who’s child had taken a turn not expected. I would always hear the handle turn and the door open and then wait and hope they weren’t looking for us.

Two months had past, his infection had been gone for a while and the kidneys were working fine now. There was joy late that night; the vent will be pulled tomorrow and so we went to bed.

Later that night the knob slowly turned and the door open, she came to us.

Tests confirmed the greatest of fears; a massive bleed, a stroke, it didn’t matter what it was called. Looking at the MRI there was much more black and very little brain left. It had destroyed his ability to move, talk or see, maybe he was able to hear we did not know. The only reason he was alive was the vent. But he was still there; I could feel him, inside his useless body. The monitor would show from time to time his blood pressure rising. I would hold and talk to him and the pressure would come down. This boy of almost nine trusted me with his life. The thought had never occurred to me---- we had spent, since the first time our eyes laid on him, giving him the best life he could have.

It would have been easier to keep him in his room playing with his toys. But we bought him a bike. I wanted him to feel the air flowing through his hair as I did many years before. I would carry him on my back down to the beach. For Halloween we would transport him from house to house in the wheelbarrow. He would get upset coming home from school and finding the clues that Kim had played in his closet with his toys. There was a time he was angry with Kim because she didn’t have a heart like his. With the four of us there, I told him it wasn’t Kim fault, nor his fault or his mothers’ or mine. But we were all a part of it and we would all get through it together.

In the middle of the night, he would sometime crawl into bed with us. I remember lying there with my arm around him. At the end of each day I would recite The Night Before Christmas. Kim would be on my left Matt on the right as we lay in bed. There was once a time in the wee hours of a morning I was feeding Kim her bottle, the wood stove dimly lite the room, there was a peaceful feeling. Matt came from his room and climbed upon my lap and slept. And so I rocked and rocked the two of them, I would like to be there now.

The thought and realization of my son being trapped inside a worn out body and the fear he would have, was unbearable. Then came the thought never before thought of. In the mist of it all I found myself in a place and time sitting in silence, as all things seemed to moving around me without the feeling of time or understanding. Looking, staring at my son’s body lying on a bed, as a machine breathed for him, tears came from my eyes in the hidden darken spaces I had found, in the hallways of hospitals and ICU’s.

It seems now that it was a physical change that took place inside the molecular makeup of my being when my purpose changed from that of giving Matt the highest and greatest quality of life to that of ending it.