Stupid and irrational thoughts...
There is a kid of eighteen years who lies in an intensive care unit in Utah, sedated to the point of a medically induced coma. He lies in this bed, intubated and tethered by transparent plastic hoses, in a hospital that sits uncomfortably close to a cemetery, both roughly seven hundred miles away from where I write this.
His own blood turned against him more than a year ago. The prognosis was never better than even odds. He recently relapsed. He's undergone chemotherapy, and picked up an unknowable infection. His lungs are filling with liquid, and his mother has just been told he has one week to live. Unless he survives, he will likely not be conscious ever again.
Some very smart and very insightful people are on their way to provide support to his mother. One of these is the smartest guy I've ever met. If anyone can be useful to her now, it's him. I could have gone, but chose not to because I feel utterly useless. She's getting the best help from the best guy we could send her.
I'm okay with that not being me. This isn't about me. It's about a mother faced with her son's imminent death.
Since I cannot be useful in Utah, I've decided to go ahead with my plans for the weekend. While this boy is lying in his bed near the cemetery, while his mother lies in bed next to him holding her dying son, I will be off wearing my armor and beating people with sticks.
This, surprisingly, does not bother me as much as you might expect, despite the ludicrous disparity between her reality and my weekend fantasy. Perhaps it is because I've been given permission by the smartest man to sit this part out. Perhaps it is because I know the mother well enough to know that she would also grant me similar leave.
Perhaps it is because I am a cold-hearted bastard who on some level knew that when I visited them a few weeks ago that he probably would not make it, and I've been able to adjust to that fact from my removed position seven hundred miles away.
But this isn't about me. Not in the slightest.
I've been going away on these weekend warrior jaunts for more than a decade. A few times a year, I drive out and fight and feast and drink with my friends. I don't take typical vacations. I don't leave town for a regular two weeks a year. I take holiday weekends for the anachronism and few days for a comic convention; those are enough for me.
Over the years, these weekends -- at this locale in particular -- have coincided with the tragic deaths of others. No one I know. Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris while I was off at one. Steve Irwin while at another. Word either reaches me in camp or over the radio on the drive home, and regardless of where I hear it I'm struck at how seemingly random it was. More than once I've remarked at how those things seem to coincide with my medieval-themed getaway weekends.
And of all the random foolish things that could enter into my head the one I find myself facing is that I'm going off to another one and this boy may well die while I am there. I know it is not a causal relationship. I am not killing the boy.
Yet, lacking any rationality, I think that the best reason I should not go is to save him. I know that's foolish. I know that whether he lives or dies has nothing whatsoever to do with where I am or what I am doing this weekend.
I think it has something to do with trying to find anything I might be able to do to help. Even if it's just a fantasy.