Miracles vs "Happy Endings"

I often despise checking my email when Sundays or Mondays come around. It’s because I seem to get bad news from the heart community on those days. I have no idea why, but it seems that when I always find out over the weekends (or Monday, if I neglect to get online on Sunday). Yesterday I got that sinking feeling again when I hopped on the computer. And found out a nice couple I met this past month had lost their daughter over the weekend, and another child with HLHS had died of the swine flu (I have a hard time using the more politically correct term H1N1, since that’s what I think of this flu virus as—swine). Another phenomenon in HLHS news is that when it rains, it cascades. For example, a couple months might pass where I hear nothing but good (including mundane—mundane is good in the HLHS family’s life, as it means no surgeries, etc!). Then suddenly, I’ll hear about several huge obstacles, battles, and/or losses at once.

This trend causes me to wonder, sometimes, if there are any happy endings with HLHS. At these times, I often get buried under the waterfall—I think about how more children than I can remember have died of HLHS since Kieran was born. Those aren’t remote numbers I got from an informational source—they’re the stories of people I knew personally or virtually. Sometimes the prayer list gets too long, sometimes I can’t remember all the names of all the children and families I want to pray for—those in the hospital, going into surgery, facing loss, facing uncertainties—and I have to, as another heart parents puts it, “send a mass email to God.”

The other day, I brought home the movie “Marley and Me” from the library, and Shawn asked me, “why does the yellow lab always die at the end?!” I replied, “I don’t know, but I guess this one’s a true story, so there’s not an ultimately a happy ending—of course it’s going to end with the dog’s death.” My cynical remark made me realize that I need to think about the “happy ending” concept. What would a happy ending to the movie have been? That Marley is cured and spends the rest of his days snoozing in the sun until…? Was I stuck on a Hollywood ending—the spirit of which says life will stop at that one happy moment of resolution—the newly-married couple will ride off in the sunset, to never grow old and know decline, hardship, and loss? If all lives end in death, what really is a happy ending?

When I examined what I thought of as a “happy ending” for a kid with HLHS, I certainly didn’t imagine a child in a hospital bed, drs shaking their heads, and parents’ hearts breaking. So what was my version? That a kid with HLHS could live to an old age—grow old, have loves, have a family? Well, I think as parents we all want those things for our children. And some kids with HLHS have, indeed, done some of these very things. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that for our children. But should we consider this progression of events the be-all end-all of a happy ending? The measure of a life? Is that our worldly view of a happy ending—the one to which we’re holding on and refusing to see other definitions?

If we truly believe that whatever is lost will be returned to us—someday, somewhere, this life or the next—in manners we never imagined, in a way that goes beyond our wildest dreams—I think there must be a different measure of “happy ending” than longevity and milestones. That measure would be what goes beyond daily constraints to the atypical, heightened experience of miraculous love and devotion. It often takes the atypical experience, which takes us out of the somnambulation of everyday life, to create the space miracles need in order to happen. Indeed, after Kieran was born and was in the process of undergoing his first two surgeries, I felt exactly that way--like I had just awoken from a long dream, that the mask and sheen that we put over reality had been lifted away. And thus, many of my worldly measures of value revealed themselves, and I changed my perspective on many things.

Maybe “the happy ending” is one of the hardest of these to let go. “A life well-lived,” we might like to say. But the life well lived should not be measured in months or years—but in love, impact—in how much one can cause a change of heart in others.