This is also, by extension, the tale of two friends, Renée and Melissa, and of two families, the Halls and the Bradfords, and of two freak events that yanked all of the above onto two different but similar, unforeseen and shadowy trajectories. The tale tells how such yanking might dislocate some joints, but how it can also make a tongue-and-groove tightness which locks parents to children, friends to friends, and families to families. Mostly, it’s a tale about how the invisible and visible realms—we’ll call them heaven and earth—are sealed to each other. Indeed, the two are one.

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Let me first introduce Big Parker. He is mine. He is the handsome boy with eyes the color of the water he’s dogpaddling in. On July 20th , 2007 he was eighteen years and five months old to the day. He was also lying in a coma in an Idaho Medical Center with the French name, Port Neuf. He’d been trying repeatedly to free a college classmate from a hidden whirlpool in a rural irrigation canal, and in the end he wasn’t able to get out himself.  The next morning there was no remaining brain activity.  He was removed from life-support.  A week from the very hour of his death, we buried his Big Parker body in a dark, narrow groove of earth.

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Little Parker, (or Petit Parker or “P.J.” for Parker John), is Renée’s.  He is the cherub on the red velvet throne.  He and his twin sister, Penelope, were conceived a few short months after Big Parker’s funeral, which Renée attended.  She’d flown to Utah from her home in Paris, which is where we Halls and Bradfords lived and loved each other and where strapping Big Parker had been the Hall’s enthusiastic home teacher with his dad-partner, Randall. For their visits, the two always rode across town together on Randall’s Vespa, and the Halls always gave Parker love-in-a-can: real, chilled, imported Dr. Pepper.

The twins formed the favored baby spotlight of an equally favored life complete with superlative parents and their three older princesses who kept things at a rollicking clip with high-froth-quotient parties, spontaneous dance-a-thons, picnics in the local parks, and frequent excursions to Eurodisney.

That is, in fact, exactly where they were on February 20th, on what would have been Big Parker’s 20th birthday.  That was the day when Little Parker (who was just turning eight months old) contracted pneumoccocal meningitis.

When I got the phone call that Little Parker was in a medically induced coma and “probably would not make it another day”, I caught the next plane to Paris. Folding and refolding the waxy white airplane napkin, I couldn’t block out possible scenes of an ashen-faced Renée folding up baby boy’s clothes to be boxed or given away; I tried to suppress the impossible notion of my boy’s name being a curse; I foresaw the fragility that would invade and potentially reduce these mighty parents; I narrated to myself the story of loss Renée would yearn to tell, and I feared all the  ears that wouldn’t want to hear it, that sacred but scary story of The Phantom Child.

At l’Hôpital Necker Enfants Malades, (the children’s hospital on the left bank of Paris), and cloaked in paper gowns, masks and gloves, Renée and I entered the isolation booth where her Parker lay motionless, his swollen head and listless body wrapped in gauze and sterile cotton, the hospital personnel avoiding eye contact while attempting efficiently light conversation. It was, to me, a still life, (“nature morte”, in French), of unspeakable but crashing familiarity. The volume of my pleading inner dialogue with God and with  Big Parker—“Make him live! Strong brain! Strong lungs, strong, strong!!”—was so loud I was sure the staff would ask me to, s’il vous plait?!, keep my thoughts down.

From that week-long coma Parker did miraculously return to life, but it was not a strong one. Cerebral meningitis had ravaged his system leaving him virtually deaf, hydrocephalic, convulsive, shunted and cut and sewn so many times his head looked like a Spirograph drawing. He was gravely compromised neurologically, his gravitational vector was shot, he was floppy and unresponsive and had to be fit with cochlear implants in order to retrieve any hearing.  (John and Renée and their four girls under age seven began teaching themselves sign language—both in English and in French. For firsthand descriptions of their ongoing journey, this is Renée’s blog, http://parkerupdate.blogspot.com/ )

Renée also writes full-bodied emails, as do I.  So we two Parker Moms have amassed volumes going back and forth tracking our shared days and boys.  We write of heaven’s severe teaching methods, the wonder of small joys, the isolation and irony that mark major loss, the sharp or bruising contours of grief’s landscape, the deepening spiritual experiences hardly transferable by written word, and our love and hope and yearning and passion for our sons who, we recognize only now, actually never were just ours.  They are, before all else, God’s.

We’ve also shared accounts of the increased presence of the Spirit—and of spirits—in our lives.  Of all such narratives, I offer you this one written by Renée during last summer’s vacation.

We arrived late on a Sunday night July 25th at my parents’ home in southern California after driving all day long from Utah. We put the kids to bed, and John fell exhausted into bed well after midnight. I stayed up a couple of more hours, tooling around and organizing, filling my notebook with to-do’s and ideas as I always do whenever I grab the rare silent moment.

At precisely 6:22 a.m., I awoke to repeated, panicked, unrecognizable screams. John and I slept in a room facing the study where we put the twins to sleep. Their door was shut. The screams were not coming from that direction. The older girls were fast asleep upstairs. The screams did not seem to be coming from that end of the house, either, but they ripped me out of bed, these high-pitch and panicked screams for help.

I wandered quickly through the dark and into the kitchen where I met my mother, who was also awakened by the terrifying, continued screams. She reported that the girls were sound asleep upstairs, I indicated that the screams were not coming from the twins’ room, either.  Puzzlement growing to panic, we wondered, “Is it the neighbors? Maybe it’s a—“

Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye through the dining room window.  A child, floating in the pool.

Not only was it a child, but it was my child, my Parker, screaming, thank God, face up, floating on his back.

Screaming and half crying, racing but unable to move quickly enough, we ran to rescue him. He was floating on his back. His limbs were not flailing or thrashing, he was not bobbing in & out of the water. His body was perfectly calm & nearly still, but he was screaming. A shrieking, unrecognizable, repeated plea for help.

He had screamed for probably 3-5 minutes by the time I became alert enough to get out of bed, traverse the length of the house to the kitchen, and wonder aloud with my mom all before we finally found him.

Melissa, you know my little boy does not know how to swim. He does not know how to float. How many two-year-olds do, even the healthy ones? The week previous I’d even noticed that with Parker’s balance issues and unusual dispersion of weight due to his hydrocephaly, he actually tended to end up on his face while in the water much more frequently than other children. And the life jackets designed to force children onto their backs actually forced Parker to his front.  He can also barely stand, let alone walk, so supervising him means we are physically holding part of him all the time close to water or while in the water.

My two year old son who can barely stand let alone walk, somehow got out of his crib and crawled through the garage, opened and passed through a second door from the garage, headed down the side yard and discovered the pool, opened a gate and decided to get into the water. All at six o’clock in the morning. How could this child navigate his way there, through a dark garage and into dark waters?

Had he not screamed (this deaf boy who without his cochlear implant is mute), we would not have found him for at least one hour when the girls woke up, asking if they could swim, or an hour later than that, when Penelope would have awakened and seen that Parker’s empty crib.

There he lay; cold, fatigued and limp for an hour in our arms before he warmed and livened up. It was then I remembered that the night before, at approximately two a.m., I’d knelt to pray.  I had prayed earnestly for a sign and for more inspiration regarding Parker and his care. I had prayed that something significant would happen the next day, something to signify to me that the Lord was still mindful of me. Me, his aching daughter, and my baby. His baby. Our sick, growing baby.

I don’t know what to think beyond these facts: That He heard and answered my prayers a little too quickly & a lot too literally for me. That there are clearly angels watching over us, over this boy, and I am so infinitely indebted to them. That miracles happen every day. That we have already seen miracles with this boy, and that I fully expect to see more. That a loving Father not only hears prayers—aching prayers of a mother with a growing boy— but that He answers them, too.

I know, too, that in spite of all precautions and vaccinations and closed doors and gates—in spite of all I want to do and can do—I am, in the end, not the one in charge here.

Melissa, can I ask this next thing? Forgive me if it cuts you wide open.  Do you think your drowned son was there holding mine up from drowning?

I’ve already given my friend my answer.

Now, friends, I’m interested in reading yours.

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