Something Happened

*What follows are a few observations and thoughts from a trip I took last week to give a talk at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I started writing as events were unfolding in real time.

**The audio version is at the end for paid subscribers.

Thursday, January 15, 2026:

I’m writing this essay at 36,000 feet on a flight from Atlanta to Kansas City. I had no intention of writing this essay when I boarded the plane, but sometimes life happens.

Something happened to me today that has both shaken me to the core and left me thinking about the nature of joy and suffering. I have nothing profound or important to say other than to share my experience with you and a few thoughts to go with it.

At the Atlanta airport this morning, I watched a middle-aged mother and father board our plane to Kansas City with their severely disabled son. As it was, father, son, and mother sat in the row directly right in front of me. The parents were in their mid-fifties and the son seemed to be in his mid-twenties. As far as I could tell, the son was a quadriplegic, non-verbal, and breathed through oxygen tubes. The mother sat by the window, the father in the aisle seat, and the son in the middle. I was sitting in the aisle seat behind them, so I could partially see the young man through the gap between his seat and his father’s.

Just after we took off, the son’s assisted breathing, which was clearly audible to me, became fast, heavy, and hard. During a moment of particularly turbulent breathing, I saw the mother reach for her son’s hand, and almost immediately his breathing slowed and softened. A simple touch of a mother’s hand lowered the son’s anxiety. Occasionally, the father would take a cloth and gently wipe his son’s brow, which was glistening with perspiration undoubtedly because of the heat generated by his heavy breathing. It seemed as though the son was using all his energy and strength just to breath.

I will admit to you that I was pained—deeply—by the whole scene. Never in my life have I witnessed a scene so tender, loving, and tragic. My sense of the son’s condition is that it was not the result of accident but was congenital. I suspect he has cerebral palsy.

My first thought was that what I had just witnessed as we were boarding and as I was now experiencing on the plane was part of a process that had begun hours earlier in the darkness of the early morning when this family awoke to begin their day’s journey. I imagined what it would have taken for these parents to gently pull their son out of his bed, dress and feed him, put him in their vehicle, drive to the airport, get him to the terminal and through security, get on the plane, fly for two-and-a-half hours constantly caring for his wellbeing, get off the plane, and then reverse the whole process for the rest of the day. Just one day in their lives would exhaust anyone.

It then occurred to me that these two loving parents had done some variation of what they were doing today every single day for the last 25 years or so. In other words, the parents had done some version of today for approximately the last 9,125 days. All this struck me like a thunderbolt. Frankly, the moment was emotionally overwhelming.

I then asked of myself the obvious question: could I do what these parents are doing? Could I do what they have done for 25 years. Could I do what they have done and are now doing for the rest of my life as they will be doing for the rest of their lives? Could I love and care for a child and then an adult child incapable of caring for him- or herself? It would surely mean that all that I have done in my life and loved doing, I almost certainly would not and could not have done. My life would have been radically different. My wife and I would have had to spend every single day of our lives thinking and worrying about and caring for our helpless child. Would my marriage have survived? God forbid, would I have abandoned my child to institutional care as have many parents?

After thinking through what it would mean to have a child with a severe disability, I recalled that moment when each my three (now adult) children were born. I don’t mean to speak for all fathers, but I suspect many have done some version of what I did. Each time a nurse put one of those helpless babies in my arms, I welled up with emotion, my eyes filling with tears, and I whispered to each one my children these words: “I will love you, and I will care for you, and I will protect you every day for the rest of my life.” And when I said it, I meant it. I meant it more than anything I had ever said in my life before. Other than my wedding vows, never have I said words that I meant with such ferocious intensity and commitment. I meant those words so much that they hurt—hard. In each of those three successive moments, I became a different person. Something about me was different and better than before. And now, 30, 28, and 26 years later, I can still feel the remnants of an emotion that will never leave me.

In those three moments and with those simple words, I experienced the obvious emotion of life-altering joy. The joy I felt each time was that all-too-human joy knowing that my wife and I had created new life, that my wife (the one who had once thought she might not want to have children) had carried and brought into the world three beautiful babies. Like all parents, I felt the earth-shattering joy that I was holding in my arms each time the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt the joy that I was now a father. I felt the joy that we would now be a family. I felt the joy that we would live and love together for the rest of our lives. Nothing in my life has or ever will be better than the three times I held those babies in my arms for the first time.

But I must also tell you that in that in each of those life-altering moments, I also experienced two other emotions very different from joy: anger and fear.

I felt anger because in an instant, when I made that pledge to each of my babies, I knew that my life would never be the same again. I knew that I had taken on a new role in life. As a father, I was now a protector and everything that entails. I knew that from that point forward my only real job in life was to protect my wife and children. But to be a protector assumes that there are forces in the world from which your children must be protected. As I write these words, I am reminded of that line from Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road, when the father says to his son (which I paraphrase from memory), “if they touch you, I’ll kill them, because that’s my job.” When I first held each of my children in my arms, I didn’t say exactly those words to them or to myself, but they do express near perfectly what I felt in those three moments, and what I still feel today. (And I’m blessed now to feel the very same thing about my grandchildren.)

Make no mistake about it: that is my job—to protect and care for my children. No human law could stop me from doing whatever it took to keep them safe. I knew that instantaneously when I held each of my babies for the first time. There is something deeply primal that happens when a young man becomes a father (something that is and must be otherwise buried deep in one’s consciousness because of its ferocity), and I’m sure something similarly primal happens (but perhaps in a different way) to a young woman when she becomes a mother. I will also tell you that in that moment when I said those words to each of my babies and then in a millisecond experienced first joy and then anger, I felt something that scared me—something so powerful knowing I could live out McCarthy’s words (without hesitation or remorse) in order to protect my children.

But in each of the three most important moments of my life, I also felt a third emotion: a tinge of fear. The fear that any one of my children could suffer some unexpected malady beyond my ability to protect them that would change the course of their lives and mine. The ominous threat of a life-altering illness or accident is always lurking in the back of a parent’s mind. We fear the hand of fortune and tragedy. Suffering does not define the human condition, but we all know that fortune is a harsh mistress whose presence lurks in the dark corners of life. It’s an omnipresent force that we can never entirely shake. We all know that we will all, at some point in our lives, suffer the loss of loved ones. We can’t escape the pain and suffering that inevitably defines the human condition.

But for the grace of God (idiomatically speaking), I have not faced such tragedy, but I know the possibility is always there. In many ways, the emotion of fear is much more present in a parent’s life. Life is full of unexpected tragedy, and parents live in quiet fear for their children and for themselves. Tragedy is not man’s natural condition, but the possibility is always there, and parents fear it. Our radar is always on high alert with our children, particularly when they are young. We fear a toddler walking onto a busy street, we fear the sixteen-year-old who goes out at night with a car, and we fear the possibility of a child being diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening disease.

So, could I be as brave and loving as the two parents sitting in the row in front me?

I don’t know. I’d like to think so. To these two parents whom I don’t know and their son, I say thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the words I whispered to my children on the days they were born. Thank you for filling my eyes today with the same tears of joy, anger, and fear.

Sometimes it’s good to feel alive.

*** Addendum.

Friday, January 16:

There is a sad addendum to my travels.

On my way home from Kansas, I had a two-hour layover in Atlanta. Sitting directly across from me was a slightly younger family than I had seen the day before: a mother and father in their late thirties, and what looked to be a ten-year-old girl in a wheelchair. The girl seemed to have little control of her arms and legs, and her fingers and wrists were curled and bent toward her forearms. The girl, who didn’t seem to have full control of her neck muscles either, would sit up for a few minutes and then slump over at the waist and her head would fall almost into her lap. She had the body control of a rag doll. The sitting up and then slumping over went on for almost an hour.

During that entire time, her parents, who were sitting to one side of her, said nothing to their daughter; indeed, they didn’t even bother look at her—not once! Instead, their own heads were bowed as they doom scrolled on their phones. Their daughter might as well have been sitting by herself without her parents, without anyone, lost in a sea of strangers. In that moment, I saw a girl with no one to love, care, or protect her. My anger mounted, but I felt helpless to do anything with her parents sitting right there. Eventually, an older woman, probably a grandmother, sat down beside the girl and gently put her granddaughters head on her shoulder to rest. And still the parents do nothing! At that moment, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sadness for this girl and total contempt for her parents.

As if her afflictions weren’t enough, this young girl seemingly does not have parents who love her enough to shoulder her suffering.

Sometimes it feels rotten to be alive!

***Second Addendum:

My last flight was moved to a different gate. I made my way to a new seat. I sat down beside a young man, probably in his late twenties. A few minutes later his equally young wife approached and dropped a beautiful baby boy on dad’s lap. This little baby boy squealed with delight. Dad immediately started bouncing his son on his thighs and Eskimo kissing this little baby boy. This is life as it should be.

Let us all “suffer the little children” to come into our lives with a love that is at once tender and ferocious.

Our children—all children—must know that life is beautiful. They deserve nothing less.

Have a great week!

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