Our encounter with the yellow balloon was an incredible, uplifting gift. Like the visit of Christopher’s Spirit, it seemed to be a demonstration of the depth of his love that he would show us with such clarity—not once, but twice—that his soul had survived the death of his body. Looking back, I think that the strangest aspect of the whole experience was not the encounter itself, but how little it relieved our grief.
Jordan’s blithe acceptance of Christopher’s immortality belied the grief he felt at being separated from him. Several months after Chris’s death, Christina and I found Jordan lying in bed one night, quietly crying.
“Jordan, what’s the matter?” asked Christina, as she sat on the bed and cradled his head in her arms.
“Christopher!” he sobbed. We all lay on the bed together and cried, and then we told stories about the funny and wonderful things Chris used to do. We remembered the time he went to see Jim Henson’s movie The Dark Crystal. He loved Jim Henson’s Muppets, and Henson himself as Kermit the Frog was almost as beloved by Chris as was Big Bird. But The Dark Crystal was another matter, an adult fable in the guise of a children’s story. About 15 minutes into the film, as the evil birdlike Skeksis stripped the plumes from the dead emperor, Chris suddenly stood up in the theater and announced, “Get me out of here! This is too crazy for me!”
As Jordan grew from childhood into adolescence, he revealed prodigious talent as an artist, poet, and playwright. The content of his work became increasingly dark and sardonic, focusing on suffering, death, and hypocrisy with biting irony and an insight far greater than his years or life experience. When he was 12, I asked him why he was so preoccupied with the dark side of New York City—drugs, alcoholism, violence, and homelessness.
“I like to write about pain, because it’s real,” he replied earnestly. “You know, Dad, when you’re born, you’re like a lump of clay. Pain is a knife that shapes you. It makes you who you are.”
He looked past me, at a photo of himself with Christopher. At the age of 14, Jordan began a poem about his brother’s death. Its main point: five years had done nothing to dull the pain. After I read it, he said to me, “I must have been really numb after Christopher died. I remember, just a few weeks afterward I actually told someone that I had gotten over my brother’s death. The truth is, I count the days since he died.”
Every day for weeks, and every week for months, Christina and I would talk about the vision we had seen. There was comfort, to be sure, in our perception of Chris’s transformation, in the sensation of sublime joyfulness that radiated from his Spirit. But the vision could not replace the child, and the wound remained fresh, full of memories.
His oppositional behaviors now seemed funny, not daunting. There was the December evening when we drove slowly down Fifth Avenue, admiring the Christmas lights at Rockefeller Center and the elaborate window displays across the street at Saks, motorized scenes of an idealized rustic Americana in which life-sized puppets built a snowman, baked cakes, exchanged gifts, and engaged in an endless snowball fight in which no one ever got wet or hurt. Chris could not have cared less. “I wanna see the Easter decorations!” he demanded, with just a hint of playfulness. Once when we were driving downtown on Fifth, which is one-way, and he couldn’t think of something oppositional to say, he just said, “I wanna go in the other direction!” That ridiculous demand was so quintessentially Christopher, we just burst out laughing. What I learned after his death was that his incessant demand for the opposite was not really a behavioral quirk or an attempt to get attention. It was his reason for being here.
On Thanksgiving Day, three weeks after his death, Chris began to show me its meaning. We had a small family dinner that Thanksgiving, joined by Grandma, who came down from Connecticut, and by Christina’s brother George and his wife, Inge, who drove in from New Jersey. Christopher’s absence was palpable. This did not feel like a celebration.
As we set the table, a strange sensation suddenly swept over me. My head began to spin, I felt cold and hot at the same time, and the energy drained out of me.
“I feel like I’m getting the flu,” I mumbled, and went back to my bedroom to lie down. My body felt leaden, heavy enough to sink right through the mattress and the pillow. An immense dark cloud filled my brain, bringing with it a profound feeling of depression. I had never felt this way before, even when very ill. I knew this malady was not the flu, but I didn’t know what it was.
My mind drifted back to something Christina had just said about Christopher. I had been planning a trip to the Grand Canyon with Christopher and Jordan. We would go in June, as soon as Jordan’s school ended, driving cross-country. Chris had never taken a trip as long as that, but he liked riding in the car . . . he loved being with Jordan . . . Jordan loved being with him and, anyway, was easy to travel with, so Chris could get most of my attention. The trip would be a welcome challenge for all of us. Jordan was excited about seeing the Canyon; Chris was just excited about traveling with us. To him, the destination was inconsequential. His last words to Christina, spoken gleefully on the telephone two days before his death, were “I can’t wait to go on that trip with Leo!”
I had been so involved in my work that many times Chris came second or third or fourth or fifth or barely figured into the equation describing how I spent my time. Friends and family considered me a devoted father. But I knew that, most of the time, the demands of my work had come first.
As I lay in bed, immobilized by my mysterious illness, the sensation of Christopher’s disappointments began to grow inside me, like a giant swell raised by a storm at sea. I was overcome by feelings that appeared to be his, as if Chris had suddenly taken control of my mind. The swell of emotion began crashing all around, tossing me about like the surf that breaks after a storm. I had ridden the waves in high surf on many occasions, and the one lesson I had learned was Don’t resist: let them pull you down and wait for release. Which is what I did now.
I cried Christopher’s tears. I felt the frustration that flowed from his handicap as if it were mine. I was inside a boy driven only by love, with the soul of an angel, the wisdom of a sage, and a brain whose wiring was so erratic in its connections that it never seemed to do anything right. I cared most about the people around me, whoever they were. I wanted to engage them, each and every one, in a never-ending dialogue. They fascinated me. I loved them and I wanted them to love me. But I kept doing things that made them angry—and that was part of the fascination, because the anger was a form of dialogue. Then they would turn away, reject me, try to ignore me, try to disengage themselves from my embrace. Sometimes I knew how to say, “Come back. I love you.” Most times, I fanned the flames of their anger to renew their dialogue with me, Christopher. At those times, I felt so terribly lonely. I never wanted pain, not for me, not for them. But it always seemed to come.
I especially loved my mom. I remembered her hugs and caresses. I hungered for them. So I tormented her more than anyone else. I knew every behavior she couldn’t cope with, and I used them all. She hated whining, so I would complain and make endless demands in the whiniest voice I could invent. She needed sleep, so I would bang on the walls of my bedroom at night. She recoiled at waste, so I would break everything I could get my hands on. I wanted her to love me in spite of everything I did, with the same total, unconditional love that I felt for her. I loved my brothers. I loved that we were three and then four. How I wanted to be like them! They could do everything. They could read books and signs and write anything they wanted to and draw wonderful pictures. I couldn’t draw a straight line. I didn’t know what skiing really was, but I knew that they were expert skiers. And they could swim and dance, play tennis and soccer. I kept walking into walls and doors. One winter when Burr Pond froze hard, I ventured onto the ice. Everyone else could skate. I could barely walk. Every part of my life seemed so difficult.
The pounding surf of Christopher’s sadness dragged me under until my lungs were about to burst. Then Christina entered the bedroom and I felt myself coming up for air.
“How are you feeling?” she asked tenderly.
“I don’t know what’s wrong. I feel completely depressed. I can’t stop thinking about Christopher. I feel like I’m reliving every disappointment he ever knew.”
She lay on the bed and cradled my head in her arms, as if I were a small child. I fell asleep.
I awoke feeling as if a huge foam wall of surf were about to crash on my head. I gasped and dove under it. Closing my eyes, I felt Chris’s emotional turmoil tumble over my back and wash away. I was suddenly in a clear space. Christopher’s Spirit was with me here. It was not quite the same Spirit I had seen at the moment of his death. The brightness and the power were present, but not the same triumphant joyfulness. It was entering the body of a small, limp marionette, a broken body with some of its strings cut and so small that the Spirit had to shrink or condense in order to enter. Cramming that huge, buoyant Spirit into the small, rigid puppet seemed as hard as shoving the cluster of 22 yellow helium balloons into the back of the hearse.
The image vanished. I was in a twilight zone between sleep and waking, and thoughts were racing through my head. I remembered a thought that had suddenly struck me five years earlier. We were on Martha’s Vineyard, and I went out to take a morning run to South Beach. Jordan was three and a half. He threw a tantrum in an attempt to stop me from running and keep me at home. His brothers diverted his attention, playing a game with him so that I could leave for my run in peace. Pacing my stride as I turned onto the road that ran alongside the dunes, I suddenly thought, How hard it is to be a person! Here was Jordan, a loving and generous child, with a maturity of understanding that always seemed to surpass his years, living in the body of a small child, feeling the frustrations of a toddler, expressing himself through a tantrum. Life seemed like an endless boot camp, a constant overcoming of who we were to become who we could be.
As I lay in bed, I heard a voice speaking. I was not sure if it came from inside me or from outside, whether it was my voice or Christopher’s. I heard it with my brain, not my ears, a thought spoken in silence. “Yes, it is hard to be a person. Life is difficult on purpose. It’s designed to be difficult, a training ground for the Spirit, harder for some than for others, but easy for no one. We all come from a Holy Place, fragments of God, and we come here to learn one lesson, a lesson of transformation. Alchemy exists. True alchemy—the only alchemy—is meeting pain, anger, and hatred, and giving back love.”
The voice spoke slowly, repeating each phrase several times, like an echo. As the last echo faded away, I awoke to find myself sitting up in bed. The depression had lifted, and with it went the heaviness in my limbs. I looked at the clock by the side of the bed. Six hours had elapsed since I first fell sick. I stretched my arms. My body felt light as a feather, my mind felt as clear and bright as the blue sky that follows a hurricane.
Chris’s voice—or some other voice responsive to his teaching—had just explained to me in no uncertain terms that the purpose of living is the education of the Spirit, and in that education one discipline precedes all others: learning the alchemy that converts anger, hate, and pain into love. I had just spent a harrowing six hours reliving Christopher’s education and confronting my own failure to give him comfort—an agony I hoped never to repeat. I wasn’t yet sure what I had learned about myself, but I understood beyond doubt that Chris had been a master alchemist. No one I knew had absorbed so much pain and given forth so much love. Out of love, he had given me an insight into the meaning of life that outstripped anything I deserved.
My heart was full, and tears of gratitude flowed down my cheeks.