Chapter 24: Rededication

“Grab the paddles,” the attending physician shouted, “Stat!”

The defibrillator instantly appeared from a hatch in the wall, and a fully staffed medical team in scrubs descended on our little recovery room within seconds of the heart monitor’s alarm bell. The technician at the controls of the pacemaker tried time and again to make the pulsating blips catch the rapidly accelerating waves before time ran out. It looked like a harmless video game on the pixilated, green screen, but the look on his face as he frantically turned the dial revealed that this was no game – this was deadly serious.

100 beats per minute turned to 150, then to 200. Fibrillation set in, and the readout showed 250 beats a minute and climbing; by this time, it was obvious that Jaedin’s heart couldn’t possibly be circulating any blood to his extremities. Again and again, the electrical pulses – controlled by a dial in the medic’s hands – tried to catch the rapidly accelerating rhythm of Jaedin’s heartbeat to coax it back to a safe pulse. Once it hit 300 we knew it was only a matter of seconds before the onset of brain damage, a coma, and then a fatal collapse.

Moments before, we had been sitting at his bedside in relative privacy, absolutely exhausted but able to relax for the time being with a difficult surgery just behind us. We were finally breathing a sigh of relief when the alarm had sounded. Now we stood on the sidelines as the ER team scurried around, each member playing his part; we as the parents, on the other hand, had no role at all to play. We had been reduced to mere distractions; our only job was to stay out of the way. We couldn’t even hold our little boy’s hand or stroke his head. It was an awful, helpless feeling. All we could do was hope and pray for a miracle.

At that point, we knew full well that Jaedin’s life was entirely in God’s hands…and in the hands of some stranger with his fingers on the dial of a machine that I couldn’t understand in the least. We prayed that God’s hands might guide the hands of this stranger – a man we had first laid eyes on a few seconds before, but who had now become to us the most important stranger on the planet. We knew that every second was absolutely crucial. The fibrillation continued, and the paddles were readied. It was like a scene out of a prime-time emergency room drama. I pictured Jaedin’s little body reacting to the pulse. What would the jolt of electricity do to him? I could only imagine from what I had seen on television.

Thankfully, the pacemaker caught up to his heart at the very last instant and managed to gradually slow the rhythm, eliminating the need for the paddles. After a few more minutes, the attending physician pronounced the exercise a success. They shoved the defibrillator back into the hatch, took off their masks, and clocked out. They went home to their families and in all likelihood had nothing new to report from this uneventful shift; it was all in a day’s work for them. I, on the other hand, had been permanently affected by those agonizing few minutes. The fear, the uncertainty, the harrowing helplessness…it was indescribable. We typically picture post-traumatic stress disorder being associated with military conflicts or other violent situations, but this scenario to me represented an equally traumatic application.

Three stress-laden years had elapsed since a surgeon closed the door of a small consultation room, sat us down, and told us that a congenital defect had left our newborn son’s heart with a single functioning pumping chamber. Jaedin had stopped breathing at just one hour old and was immediately placed on life support, but even that would not prevent him from slowly suffocating. A surgical intervention was his only chance, we were told, but the probability that he would survive the crucial series of open heart procedures was essentially a coin toss. The choice was ours to make, but we had to choose right then and there.

Ever since I had spent time among the veterans and war widows in East Germany, I had wondered how people can possibly handle the trauma of war. A few of the stories we heard had haunted me ever since, like the families who had been forced to play Russian roulette with each other. How could your heart, your brain, or your soul ever return to normalcy after those experiences? Because my life of comfort seemed so far removed, I had always assumed that I could only feel what they felt in proxy, by reading their stories or listening to their words.

The way this news stunned me, though, it may as well have been wartime. It was as if the surgeon himself were a sergeant, forcing me to play his cruel game. Three bullets in a six-gun; he spins the barrel, hands me the gun, and points toward my son. If I don’t pull the trigger, he’ll load the other three bullets and do it himself. If I play his wicked game, I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of keeping my son alive. What’s my move? These were unthinkable scenarios that had actually been faced by real families. In Jaedin’s case, foregoing the operations would have added the other three bullets; the chance of losing him would have been certain. To some degree, I think I sensed something similar to the feeling faced by those war-torn families; whether the choice was being imposed on us by cruelty or genetic fate, Jaedin’s chance of survival was unpredictable. Surgery was our only choice with a chance of life, so we spun the barrel and fired.

The first operation and ensuing recovery period were excruciating. The knot in my stomach at the sight of our infant boy – and at the thought of losing him – brought me as much physical pain as any illness or injury could have caused. He was hooked up to a matrix of machines and monitors that constantly sent signals and fluids through his body. They had sawed through his sternum and literally split open his little body. He was left in agony for days at a time, with organs exposed in his open chest cavity, his insides so swollen and bruised that the incision couldn’t be closed. The heavy sedation couldn’t hide the miserable look on his face.

We wondered whether we had made the right decision in proceeding with the risky operations, but our doubts were erased a few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, when we finally got the green light to bring him home. It was bittersweet, since many of the other families we had come to know in the children’s hospital were not as lucky. For me there never was or ever has been since a Christmas Eve quite as gut-wrenching, soul-stirring, or thought-provoking as that one.

Each subsequent surgery became ever more painful, as we had come to know Jaedin’s personality that much better in the meantime. Three years later we brought him in for what we hoped would be his final procedure. By the time we kissed him goodbye and they wheeled him into the operating room, I could literally feel the strain on my own heart.

From the waiting room, I watched the clock intently. In those critical thirty minutes on life support, the second hand’s tick became an unbearable noise. Machines were breathing for him, pumping his blood while his heart lay still, packed in ice. What if there were a power outage, an earthquake, an equipment failure? A heart no bigger than an acorn was being sliced and sutured; the minutest slip of the fingers could do irreparable damage.

During that journey through Limbo, I discovered that I count my own life for nothing. I had contemplated my own mortality before, but I didn’t know until this trial that I would trade my life in a heartbeat for that of my child. I came to realize that I don’t fear death in the least for myself; I know that I would beg God to take me instead. Like Jean Valjean kneeling over Marius, I would cry, “Let him live…Let me die.”

Following cardiopulmonary bypass, there are no guarantees that the attempts to jump-start the heart will be successful. For any waiting family, the anticipation during these crucial minutes is excruciating. Already worn nerves are frayed even further, exacerbated by the fact that updates can be delayed by an hour or more before they reach the waiting room. During that time – when a team of strangers knows the fate of a loved one while relatives are left guessing – the minutes seem to stretch into hours.

Finally, an orderly emerged from the operating room with an update: Once again, Jaedin’s pulse had returned. We immediately uttered our prayers of thanks. We didn’t quite have our son back yet, but the worst was over.

Jaedin’s successful bout with fibrillation came a few days later; it had given us quite a scare, but we were relieved to be able to put these troubles behind us. We finally took him home, grateful beyond measure to have no further procedures on the horizon. It was time to return to work and regain a routine in our lives.

An opportunity to present some research at a trade conference arose, and I thought my wife might want to join me for a well-deserved break. A company-paid hotel room at a mountain resort seemed tempting, but the altitude would present some problems for Jaedin. After talking over our options at length and taking Jaedin through a full checkup, we got the cardiologist’s approval to leave him with his grandparents for a few days while we went about rebuilding our frazzled nerves.

As it turned out, though, his troubles were far from over. Soon after we checked into our hotel almost 800 miles away, we got a message that Jaedin’s oxygen saturation was beginning to drop. We found ourselves on the phone with the airline looking to change our return flights. The next available flight would be the following day, so we decided to relax a bit and enjoy the crisp, September air in the meantime. Early the next morning, we received the devastating news that the downward spiral had continued and his condition was declining further; we needed to leave immediately.

As we scrambled to finalize our travel arrangements, another catastrophic piece of news suddenly saturated every media outlet in a bizarre twist of fate: The Twin Towers had fallen, the country was under attack, and no aircraft would be leaving the ground for days. The nation’s most traumatic day had somehow managed to land right in the midst of the most traumatic time in our personal lives.

We embarked on a frantic, all-night drive, passing through one small town after another. American flags were flying everywhere across a nation united as never before, but the implications of the colossal, international tragedy took a back seat to our mad rush. We finally arrived at the 24-hour urgent care center where Jaedin had been admitted; the doctors in this small facility had never encountered his heart condition before and didn’t know what to make of his plummeting blood oxygen saturation levels. He would have to be transferred to a larger center with specialized pediatric cardiologists.

Doernbecher Childrens Hospital – the closest facility that fit the bill – was over 100 miles away; an ambulance quickly backed up to the emergency entrance and whisked him off. Already exhausted beyond comprehension, we sped on through the night, following the flashing lights as closely as we could manage. News reports from Ground Zero blared from the car’s speakers, making for a surreal cocktail of heart-wrenching emotion.

Immediately after arriving at Doernbecher, a surgical team sprang into action and began their life-saving procedures. In a whirlwind of sleep-deprived mania, we struggled to make sense of the periodic updates being relayed to the nurses’ desk.

Finally, the resident doctor emerged from the operating room with a first-person status update. Jaedin had contracted staphylococcal endocarditis, a dangerous, internal infection; they had removed as much of the infected tissue as they could possibly manage, but the Gore-Tex shunts and other artificial components buried deep inside his organs would remain resistant to the antibiotics while serving to harbor the staph infection. We were told that even if he managed to fight off the infection with antibiotics, a potentially fatal strain could reappear at any time. The large incision on his chest would have to remain open, leaving his wounds around his chest cavity exposed; he would need an intravenous line in his arm to pump antibiotics into his system for a year or more – and quite possibly for life, however long that might be.

The drip lines gradually weaned him from the anesthetic over the next few hours, forcing our small soldier’s body back to life. Our little boy was in absolute agony. As I watched them wheel him past us, trapped behind panes of plexiglass in a wretched state, I began to question our original choice to subject him to the series of surgeries. Should we have just let him die peacefully in his sleep right after he was born? We had forced him through what a three-year old can only perceive as intentional torture. How could he possibly know the difference? I couldn’t help viewing the procedure through his eyes, where the cardiac surgeon might as well have been Dr. Mengele – the Angel of Death – himself.

Jaedin had been drafted to wage this war without a say in the matter. We had made the choice on his behalf out of love and a stubborn dedication to life; but had it really been for him or had we selfishly made the choice for ourselves? I, for one, was finished. I felt as broken as our little boy – completely vanquished in body, mind, and spirit. No endurance race had ever left me more physically drained. Inside my soul, I questioned the scriptural promise that trials would remain within the limits of our own strength; I don’t know if I said it aloud or to myself, but I distinctly remember praying, “No more…I just can’t deal with any more.”

Right or wrong, however, the choice had been made; the weapons were cast, and there was no retreat from this battlefield.

Later that afternoon, I went for a run in the adjacent forest to catch a breath of fresh air. Somewhere along the way I collapsed in a heap on the ground and cried my eyes out. As I stumbled back over the hospital’s sky bridge and watched the sun set behind the Tualatin Mountains, the lyrics of a song that had touched me again and again during Jaedin’s trials came to my mind:

You gaze upon the sunset,

With such love and intensity,

If you could only crack the code,

You’d finally understand what this all means.

But if you could, do you think you would,

Trade in all the pain and suffering?

Ah, but then you would have missed the beauty,

Of light upon this earth, the sweetness of living.

In that instant I would undoubtedly have chosen to remove his suffering, but deep inside I knew that someday, in hindsight, I would recognize the truth of those words and accept the necessity of the trial in refining our souls.

As I made my way back inside the hospital I found my wife staring at Jaedin through the glass. We felt awfully alone, but little did we realize as we reluctantly began to drag our way through the trenches on this forced march, a veritable army was already rallying in our behalf.

In a Fresno cathedral, the Hispanic congregation lit candles to the Saints, calling all angels to Jaedin’s side. In temples dotting the world, Mormons dressed in white and slipped his name onto prayer rolls, summoning God to hear their prayers. Agnostic coworkers stayed up late around their computers, sending out mass e-mails for fundraising efforts and spreading the word in any way they could.

We’re trying, we’re hoping,

But we’re not sure how this goes.

Calling all Angels around the world were prayer rolls, rosary beads, vibhuti ash, mezuzahs, and other symbols of devotion that people turn to and desperately cling to in times of abyssal need. Each of these emblems in their unique and peculiar way embodied a fervent wish that had for the moment united a diverse group of allies wishing to support us.

A few weeks later, armed with innumerable messages of support, we took him home once again. This time, there were no stitches, clamps, or staples binding his open chest wound. It had left such a gaping hole in his body that we simply couldn’t imagine how it would ever close on its own. Each day was a struggle, and we had to bring him back to the clinic for endless blood tests to maintain a delicate balance: keeping his blood thin enough to prevent his heart from overworking itself, yet thick enough to coagulate and prevent him from bleeding to death if he suffered a cut.

Any movement on his part during the blood draw would prolong the process, so I would pin him down with all my strength. One vein after another became damaged and scarred, and the poking and prodding became ever more painful to him. As I restrained him, he fought me with a strength I didn’t know he had in him. Each time, he looked at me with a set of expressions that began with confusion and fear and then evolved into anger and resentment for what we were putting him through. It broke my heart every time.

In the end, our little warrior fought his way through this daily battle with all the courage of a seasoned veteran. Every night we nursed and dressed his wound, which did eventually begin to close on its own. The permanent IV line that pumped him full of antibiotics several times each day became an accepted facet of life. When he eventually began to walk again, the pump had to come with him. We were worried about his spirit, but when we got him a toy shopping cart he loaded up his pump and happily pushed his ball and chain with him everywhere that he went. In spite of my doubts, a look into his eyes revealed that this battle was his own; a God-given strength lay within him, and he would emerge the victor.

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Just a few weeks after the calamity of September 11 had coincided with our own tumultuous time, the Saints gathered in unprecedented numbers to hear the words of the prophets. Never before had this generation felt such a need for guidance, and I was no exception. One by one, the speakers stood to address a stunned General Conference audience reeling from the blow dealt by terror. What message did the world need to hear?

As with the other Brethren, the question had been weighing heavily on Elder Boyd K. Packer’s mind over the previous weeks. As he considered the content of his message in earnest prayer, he recognized the similarities between the rubble of the World Trade Center and post-war Leipzig. He could see a four-year old boy and his newly widowed mother wandering through the ruins in search of food. He imagined their suicidal sense of despair at having lost nearly everything in their native – and now nonexistent – homeland in Silesia, alongside the contrasting sense of hope they felt when they came across a placard proclaiming life after death – a placard placed by none other than Herbert Schreiter.

Elder Packer distinctly felt that this particular rise from the ashes was precisely what the Church needed to hear! As President Schulze’s conversion story was canonized in Elder Packer’s General Conference address, our own troubles and struggles seemed remarkably pale by comparison. I didn’t know whether Brother Schreiter was still alive, but I wondered how he might have felt to hear his name spoken from the pulpit. Having been schooled in the art of printing placards by his tall, American companion, he might have even acknowledged Hamp’s small contribution to this epic scene.

I wanted to rekindle my connections to this little circle in Germany, but realistically, I had to concede that I might not see Brother Schreiter again in this life. Given the risks in light of Jaedin’s condition, an extended absence for overseas travel was simply out of the question.

A short time later President Schulze traveled to the U.S. to accept a call as an Area Seventy, and I learned that a mission reunion was being organized in Salt Lake around his visit. Though I had not seen President Schulze in years, some updates had reached me by means of other missionaries. Shortly after I had returned from Germany as a missionary, he had helplessly witnessed a swerving vehicle strike his wife Inge as she walked along the side of a German road. On hearing the news of her tragic death, I had sent an e-mailed condolence letter, but it seemed awfully, awkwardly inadequate at the time. I had been hoping to see him again in person, so I jumped at the chance for a quick trip to Utah to attend the reunion.

Seeing him again brought back a flood of memories. He gave me a vigorous handshake and a firm pat on the back. Though his English was fluent by now, he asked me in German, “So my dear brother, how’s your health?”

I looked down at my growing waistline and grimaced a bit.

“I mean your spiritual health, of course!” he clarified with a gentle smile.

I knew it wasn’t a simple yes-no question, but I just nodded my head. “I didn’t know there was going to be a test,” I joked, “Did you bring your stethoscope?”

He laughed and I quickly changed the subject to recount some early memories of the Berlin Mission’s beginnings. We certainly had some stories to tell, but in the back of my mind I was still considering my answer to his first question. I wasn’t prepared to return and report on my post-mission life; as with a trip to the doctor or the dentist – where you know you could have flossed more or could have done without that last trip to Krispy Kreme – it was too late to talk about plans or goals and time to just step on the scale and face the truth.

My introspection was getting the better of me when he asked, “Have you met my wife Helga?”

I shook my head and turned to greet her.

I was met with a rather pleasant surprise; I had heard that President Schulze had remarried in the meantime, but I certainly hadn’t expected to see a familiar face. Helga was our very own Sister Schröder, our eternal investigator from Berlin. I laughed as I put the pieces together, remembering how President Schulze had told us there was no hope for her and that we should cut her loose. Apparently she had found her way back to church years later and had been baptized – on her own timeframe; yet another circle closed in my head.

Other former missionaries had lined up behind me, eager to speak to the president, so I excused myself and left to wander around the room…and to fill my curiosity at what had become of my fellow ex-missionaries. I was especially fascinated to find out which poor souls were now legally bound to live with some of my former companions. Though I cherished most of the relationships I had formed with other missionaries, I painfully recalled a few that had me praying for a transfer letter in the mailbox after each month spent together.

As one companion in particular introduced me to his spouse, I faked a smile and shook her hand. Behind my teeth, I said to myself, “He made a month feel like eternity…and you’re in it for time and all eternity…to eternity and beyond!”

He pulled me aside after the brief introduction. “Well what do you think, Elder?” he asked with a grin. Nobody had called me Elder for a long time; it was a bit disconcerting. “Isn’t she something?” he prodded, realizing I hadn’t responded yet.

“Yeah,” I said quickly, “you’ve certainly found yourself someone special.” Picturing the patience this poor creature would need over the ensuing years of cohabitation, I added silently, “…you have no idea!”

I’m sure the feeling was mutual; no doubt he pitied my wife as well. She certainly also has a challenge on her hands that gives the edict to endure to the end a whole new meaning. As I walked away, though, I glanced back at President Schulze and laughed – in spite of our mutual faults, at least we wouldn’t have two boisterous and headstrong German women named Inge and Helga duking it out and vying for our attention in the afterlife…

Shortly after the initial reception, we all gathered in the chapel to watch a compilation of mission photos that had been turned into a slide presentation. As the procession of photos marched across the screen, a song called “Mein Berlin” played in the background, recounting various phases of Berlin’s history in its German lyrics. The words tell one man’s view of the City’s transformation through the fall of the Wall. The snapshots covered only a brief moment in the city’s history, but I certainly felt that I had some additional perspectives from which to view its many transformations: I could see it as Hamp did in its care-free heyday, when Homer and Gordon saw it overrun by fascist legions, when Herbie saw it in ruins, when my father returned to see it divided, and when I saw it reunited. What would its setting be when I take my children there someday?

In the meantime, it was wonderful to just take it all in and transport myself back to the mission days. I thought about not just the lives that had been affected, but how my own life had changed through the experience. It was a deeply stirring moment to be sitting there watching these scenes with other souls whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Last we had seen each other, we had shaken hands, bade each other farewell, and embarked on a much larger campaign. In the meantime, we had now gone out into the world, finished school, landed a job, found a spouse, started a family… We had all been living our separate lives, undertaking our isolated adventures. Some were already divorced, some were still looking for love, some had lost loved ones, and some – like me – had suffered a near-miss and learned to love a child more than we ever knew possible. It felt a bit symbolic of how we might feel when we review the mission of our earthly lives and look back at what we accomplished in our absence from home.

At the slide show’s conclusion we sang the German rendition of “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.” I looked around at this band of brothers with the realization that there were some I probably wouldn’t see again in this life; as for the rest, certainly a whole new set of adventures will have transpired by our next meeting. All sorts of emotions were racing around inside of me; which of those will match what I feel when this life ends? Will I be filled with gratitude, love, pride, or regret? How will I answer when the question of whether I have kept the faith is posed? I don’t know how much validity to ascribe to Mormon folklore like Saturday’s Warrior or My Turn on Earth, but having been armed with imagery of that sort since childhood, I could easily imagine that mission reunion being symbolic of a scene in the world to come.

We all have our battles to fight in this life; that much has been made clear to me. These battles may not bear much physical resemblance to those of our forefathers, but we will have to rise to fight them nonetheless. Our lives of comfort just make the contrast that much more clear when the challenges do come. For President Schulze, the atrocities he witnessed as a four-year old are a thing of the distant past. But even during peacetime, with so many of those childhood challenges removed, he was still called to the frontlines. No matter that the attack came from a distracted driver rather than artillery shells; whether his wife’s life was taken by drunkenness, carelessness inattentiveness, or any other cause, it would make dealing with her death no simpler than it had been to deal with his father’s death at the hands of aggression and hostility in uniform.

As for Jaedin, he has no recollection of the painful procedures we put him through anymore; my doubts as to the wisdom of our initial decision have now vanished entirely and have been replaced by lessons learned. During those difficult early years, I stood next to the veil time and again, not as a traveler, but as a prisoner trapped on this side, feeling my son slipping past it. Each time we emerged from one of his operations and took him home, I had rededicated my life to the Lord; perhaps the commitment sprang from fear, but it was nonetheless genuine. Each time, though, with the threat removed, my memory of the event eventually clouded over, and my level of commitment would dim again. Our challenge, it seems, is to keep up this rededication, committing our lives to the things that matter most, even when the things closest to us are not threatened.

I used to feel that we might be a bit ashamed to face our ancestors in the afterlife; after all, they physically endured so much more than we typically have to face in our daily lives. At times I have gone out of my way to test myself – putting my body through marathons, triathlons, and other grueling forms of voluntary torture – just to see if I can hold my own and maybe knock a few lines off my bucket list in the process. During these miserable acts of insanity I have found myself out alone on the road, with darkness approaching and the finish line still miles away. Under these circumstances I have tried to push myself to the limits – physically, spiritually, and emotionally – to take myself out to the ledge and force a glance over that edge; that is where I find myself sealed to my predecessors.

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These surrogate trials amount to only brief moments from which I can always return to the daily routine of life, where the greatest risk to my health is carpal tunnel syndrome from misaligned keystrokes and my greatest physical challenge is staying awake while reading bedtime stories to the kids. But by studying the lives of others who have gone before and essentially living their lives in proxy, embedding myself in their stories, I have come to realize that the human experience is universal. We don’t need to have crossed the plains ourselves to understand how the pioneers felt. We don’t need to have fought in a war to know how its victims feel. What we feel is what everyone feels at some point along this journey: Love, pain, gratitude, anger, doubt… I am convinced that these feelings are meant to bring us – full circle – back to our roots.