“This wasn’t Jack making fun of me.”
Then he smiled.
“Okay. It was partly Jack making fun of me.”
Everybody laughed.
“But mostly I think he wanted one last thing that was his to decide.”
And that landed harder than anything else said in that building.
Because here is what fourteen months of that illness took from my son, in order, and I kept a list without meaning to.
His school. His hair. His appetite. His privacy — a nineteen-year-old resident asked my son to take his shirt off in front of four strangers in January and Jack stopped caring about that in about six weeks, and the fact that he stopped caring is the thing that killed me.
His plans. Japan. Driving. Eventually, the ability to get from his bed to the bathroom without somebody’s arm.
And in the middle of all of that, in March, lying in bed after the worst scan of his life, that kid reached out and chose something.
