The aspect of the photo that pierces me most is his repose. Angled to sleep, face down and turned to the left on the wet sand of a Turkish shore. Hair black and wet with the Aegean. Red shirt, black shorts, feet sockless in his toddler’s shoes.
So still.
I cannot help but imagine myself as his father, my son in his place. It should have been me, he said to the reporters. Yes, I think, it should have been.
We spotted a ripple of green beneath the torrent of a swollen creek. Easy to miss behind the constant surface flash of an Alaskan summer sun, it took us three legs in a trolling helicopter to spot the dead man’s jacket waving in the current.
My teammate and I hoisted down from the helo to the trunk of pine tree that had fallen into the river. One of its stout branches had snagged the man’s jacket. He was facedown, a foot beneath the surface, one arm extended upstream as the icy waters poured around him. Boils appeared and disappeared in the current, glacier-fed, whitewater upstream and down. It was not a place to fall.
So I held on to the tree and my comrade, while he wrestled with the snarled jacket twisted hopelessly around a branch too green to break. The current was strong, the waters frigid, and the man had worn chest-high waders that now acted like sea anchors filled with gallons of creek at peak flow. I mentally rehearsed what to do if I myself fell in, recalling my swift-water rescue training: Feet downriver, paddle on your back towards shore, try not to die.
In one photo, a Turkish policeman cradles the boy’s body. Midstride up the beach, he looks away from the child held—no, cradled—away from his body with gloved hands. The Velcro straps upon the toddler’s shoes, three of four secured, but the one: rent from its home upon the other half. Dangling, as if forgotten.
My son, now three, finds himself distracted amid haste. Too often, I react with anger at his inability to move with a sense of purpose, to complete a task as directed. Underpants donned inside out and backward, shirt pulled over his neck and arms dangling, he suddenly joins a world in which toy airplanes and cars have adventures and speak to each other. This, despite the clear and repeated orders and instructions, the adult world of deadlines and schedules. He is oblivious to my need for order.
Perhaps it was the same for the boy and his father. Perhaps this is what haunts Abdullah Kurdi to this day.
The body broke free of the branch and for a moment I thought we might lose it. But Aaron held on and was able to pull it out of the current and into the eddy downstream of the trunk we were balanced upon. We each took hold of what purchase his body provided: a bit of jacket, a belt, the pale, waterlogged flesh of his wrist. We strained against his weight until the creek relinquished him, belly-down on the tree, his waders emptying atop our feet.
We entered the hospital on the day my son was born, birth plan firmly in hand: Minimal interventions. No medication. All natural. My wife donned her gown, lay down on a gurney, and the admitting nurse took her vitals and attached a monitor to her stomach. She turned up the volume and we could hear the baby’s heart, steady and strong. Then a contraction hit, and the tum-tum went silent. We asked if it was normal, but her face gave her away. No.
I took my wife’s hand when the nurse disappeared, only to reappear with a team this time, all haste and whisper. The baby’s heartbeat danced an erratic cadence across the screen, and they rushed us away, shouting, Get a room ready. Words like distress and decels.
In the room, another contraction struck my wife’s uterus. She breathed, focused. All eyes fixated on the screen. The baby’s heartbeat disappeared again and the room erupted in a flurry. A new monitor was attached to the finger of the obstetrician, who pushed it up the birth canal and onto the baby’s head.
A pattern emerged: with every contraction, the baby’s heart rate raced to rates impossibly high for me, a lifelong distance runner, to understand. And when the contraction ended, the beat dropped to the thrum of a zombie shuffle.
My wife endured, in position after primal position, self-conscious despite her pain and focus, of her tattered gown’s indecency. And with each evolution, we held our breaths in the hope that this time would be different. But they grew worse, the oscillations between high and low dancing across the fetal heart rate monitor. The baby was hurting.
The obstetrician called it. It’s getting too scary, she said.
An emergency cesarean. They cut him from the warm brine of his mother’s womb. The sounds of suction, wet flesh, masked utterances whose meaning I could not comprehend as my wife’s body shook with the force of their movements: all this amid the shine of cold metal and scentless air. I held her hand.
It’s a boy, they said, holding him as for inspection. Head misshapen from the birth canal. Skin a gunky wet purple, eyes liquid black, he wailed at me from their hands.
But what they should have said was, Mother, Father, here is your son.
The gesture was futile, but necessary. I pressed two fingers to where his carotid artery once pulsed against the skin of his neck. There was nothing, had been nothing in the hours since his all-terrain vehicle overturned while it climbed the creek’s bank, and dumped him to his fate. Nothing to revive, no living lung into which I could press my breath, my lips upon his.
His ID was that of retired military: blue cardstock, black-and-white photo. Home of record identified as a bucolic suburbia outside Anchorage. Soon the phone would ring at that address. This father, this son; this husband and grandfather: He returns to you as he came into this world.
When I witness my son asleep, every defense against treacle falls away. It becomes impossible to see him as anything but perfect. I open his door nightly, applying odd pressure to preempt it scraping against the frame, and steal into the darkness. His space heater whirring, the air purifier humming: I kneel next to his big-boy bed and let my eyes adjust. When the curves of his face come into view, I can see how he sleeps with his hands pressed beneath his waist. Since the photo of Aylan, a great sadness often descends on me. I see, not a living child, but a boy—my boy—on that beach.
I match the curve of my lips to the bridge of his nose, a puzzle piece that has found its home. He does not stir, doesn’t move. I press the kiss, hold my breath, and await the sound of his.