Is help ever selfish? More specifically, should we worry about our motivation for helping someone like a disabled child, or a older person wrestling with dementia?

Near the middle of WATB, the action takes a detour. Until that point, the focus has been on the campaign to find out whatever has been afflicting my disabled son Joseph and to provide whatever is required to overcome it. Then, just as the family is preparing to celebrate a major breakthrough, the news arrives that my 81-year-old father is in a hospital. The immediate health crisis that put him there has already passed, but for unknown reasons he has at the same time lost his grip on reality. Feeling charged up with confidence, I respond by setting out to get him fixed up, too.

I saw parallels between the two cases. Both my son and my father lacked meaningful explanations for their problems. Most recently, I’d read in his medical record that Joseph suffered from an “encephalopathy of unknown etiology,” which is Smokescreen lingo for “something wrong with the head, danged if we know why.” When I arrived at the hospital, Dad’s doctor used similar language. The sudden onset of Dad’s confusion did not seem to support a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. After all, a week earlier, he’d been up in a tree on his extension ladder, cutting limbs with a chain saw. So neither patient fit any obvious syndromes.

Both required a lot of care at present. Their doctors expected both to continue to require a lot of care.

Any parent wants to see his kids grow and develop new skills and eventually assume some constructive role in the world.

Any adult with aging parents wants them to retain, for as long as possible, the positive characteristics that made them so important for so many years.

If something threatens those objectives, I believe it’s a natural response to resist it. It’s common sense to want what we recognize as the best for them. So when Dad’s doctor began talking about putting him into a nursing home, I objected. We did not get along. But that was OK. I already had lots of practice with not getting along with my son’s doctors.

The remainder of that episode in the book concerns my efforts to connect with my father, in order to enlist his cooperation in coming back from the mental thicket he’d wandered into.

A friend who later read the manuscript questioned whether the story about my dad belonged in a book about a disabled child. She wrote, “there is NOTHING anyone can do for elderly people who go through what he went through, and a lot of tragedy going on in families where people believe that they can. You can love the person, and they will flash bits of themselves as they leave, but no one has ever found any way to treat it, and accepting that can make it a lot easier to deal with.”

With due respect to my wise friend, I kept it in, because my dad did recover, at least to a degree, and was able to return home for another year or two. He even flew cross-country to visit me and see his grandson one last time, and that outcome was easier to deal with than a nursing home. I saw a couple basic principles at work in my response to both situations:

• Encephalopathy, or brain injury, or dementia, or retardation, or whatever the hell you want to call it, acts like a barrier separating an otherwise intelligent individual from the rest of the world and perhaps even from himself. Piercing that barrier sounds like a worthy undertaking.
• Letting some uncaring ignoramus in a white coat dictate your course of action might be a bad idea.

But in going through the manuscript one last time before publication, I noticed something my father had said the night we finally made contact again. Perceiving with surprise how anxious I was on his behalf, he said (sighing, if I remember correctly), “I’ll try to pull things together for a little while longer.” In other words, it was going to be an effort for him. And he was going to be doing it for me.

Was I asking too much? Was I wrong?

Don’t be alarmed. People come to this site with a variety of beliefs, to which they are entitled. I have no intention of preaching.

But Easter is here again. In SoCal it’s nothing like the major event—which came with a sense of everything having been made new again—that I dimly recall from Easters long ago in Carolina. Still, the kids in our house are charged up. And I find myself pondering a phase in my life that’s covered in the latter chapters of WATB.

There came a point in the early 90s when our family’s confidence reached a very low ebb. The treatment program that had helped our son Joseph overcome some of his disabilities was no longer working. His mother and I had been pushing harder and harder to make it work again, and we were breaking, in every sense.

I saw myself, in those days, as the prodigal son, who’d set forth to achieve something on his own and instead found himself in the pigpen of life.

Judy helped me view our situation in those terms because, following an unexpected conversion experience, she’d reached the conclusion that there was another, far better way. With her lead, we sought guidance from people who taught that healing and fulfillment of all good desires was available thanks to the sacrifice made at the first Easter.

If the written account is taken literally, Jesus demonstrated many times that it is God’s will for people to live free from disease and disability. The first obstacle to enjoying that blessing, we learned, was simply ignorance of it. The second obstacle was failure to understand that believers have the right to it. Beyond that—and I’m paraphrasing and simplifying like crazy, on top of my very imperfect memory and understanding—success is a matter of activating divine power through faith. What is required on the part of the receiver, they taught, is not mere hope, and not an intellectual understanding, but an inner conviction that what has been prayed for is already true, regardless of appearances. Faith, we read, is “the evidence of things not seen.”

Just as belief in the therapy program had previously sustained us, this new faith removed much of the anxiety that had returned to cloud our lives.

Now, in view of what happened subsequently, conclusions might be drawn concerning the truth of the scriptures, or the merit of the teachers we had, or our own capacity. Various people I’m acquainted with would opt for one or another of those explanations. I’m inclined toward the second, but as I say in the book, the whole subject seems to be beyond anyone’s understanding. Like Judy, I had personal moments of fleeting contact with something greater than myself. But I cannot claim any enlightenment as a result. What Easter represents transcends anything manmade, certainly including religion.

Which kinda leaves me in the lurch when it comes to talking about it with the young ones.

Do you ever look back at an apparently random occurrence and marvel at the chain of events it set in motion?

Joseph, the boy in What About the Boy, came into this world, at least in part, because of a stranger’s child.

Judy and I were strolling through the park one pretty Sunday afternoon, way back in 1984, and I just happened to notice a little girl in a bright sunsuit, toddling in the grass around a blanket upon which her parents lazed.

Gee, I thought. That looks nice. Hmmmm.

Until then, neither of us had seriously entertained the notion of having kids. We were in our thirties, but I don’t know—we probably felt that we were still not too far removed from being kids ourselves. We’d stayed preoccupied with careers and deciding where we wanted to live. So a few minutes later, as we sat on a low stone wall beside the bay, Judy couldn’t believe it when I tossed out the suggestion that we make someone new.

“Really? Are you sure that’s what you want?” She looked almost frightened. Oh, she warmed to the idea quickly enough, but while wrestling with it in those first few moments, she blurted a warning that turned out to be prophetic. “If we ever split up,” she said, “this will be your kid.”

We never talked about splitting up. I don’t know why she said that, other than as a test of my commitment.

Turns out we both had plenty of commitment.

* * *

Skipping ahead a few years, another stranger’s youngster crossed our path and set a new chain of events into motion. This time, Judy was standing at a counter at Joseph’s doctor’s office, writing a check, when a child rolled onto her foot. Looking down, she recognized disability in an Asian skin. As Joseph had been until recently, this kid was saddled with a problem that prevented him from crawling or doing much of anything.

A conversation ensued with the mother, who was an immigrant from Taiwan. When they learned that we’d helped our son overcome a problem similar to the one they faced, both parents wanted to meet us. Before long, we were very close, and when they returned to Taiwan, they wanted us to visit them there. Until then, neither of us had entertained the idea of traveling to Asia at all. We knew virtually nothing about that side of the world.

Well, we went. And I absolutely loved Taiwan, and everything I could see about Chinese culture, but let’s save that story for another day.

* * *

All human relationships end sooner or later, and one day Judy and I did split up. Cancer took her. Let’s save that for another day, too. (All this is in the book, by the way.) But because the little girl in the park prompted a decision to have a child of our own, and because in turn our boy broadened our horizons sufficiently, one day I found myself traveling solo in mainland China, relying on a recently acquired and very imperfect command of Mandarin. That’s where I met Song Yi, who later became Joseph’s stepmother, and who then blessed Joseph with two charming siblings.

Nobody could have planned out a story like this. And I’ll bet you’re thinking of similar astonishing chains of events. Want to share?

When I took a personal writing course from Tom Larson a few years ago, I learned that memoir focuses on a single phase of the author’s life (as opposed to, say, autobiography, which starts with the author’s birth and hits all the highlights from there on). Memoir, as it’s conceived these days (or as Tom presented it anyway, and he should know), involves reflection about how just one piece of life has changed the writer.

Reflection and change are the key words.

Memoirists examine their selected piece of life and in the process come to conclusions about the significance of past relationships, or trials they’ve faced, or the effect on them of involvement with certain ideas.

The earliest memoirs I recall reading were not like this. They gave the inside scoop on important, well-known events from the point of view of the principal actors. Examples are The Double Helix, by James Watson, and One Life, by Christiaan Bernard. (Hm, this kind of fare suggests that I must’ve had a fascination with medical science long before the events in my own story.)

Some memoirs today have the same rationale (Let’s Roll!, by Lisa Beamer comes to mind). But the recent excitement about the genre concerns something different. Nowadays we have “literary memoirs,” in which mostly unknown people, who have no connection with ground-breaking discoveries or newsworthy events, explore their specific situations in a way that sheds light on a more universal story. In these books, the subject tends to be an intense emotional—perhaps a very personal—experience. Because of that, even though the writer may have emerged from the experience by the time he begins setting it down on paper, the result is not the sort of thing he can plan out in advance, because the process of working through all the emotions involved can lead to unexpected conclusions.

There is conflict between what I the writer knew then, when I was doing it, vs what I know now. Apparently, it’s not at all unusual for the memoirist looking back to perceive that what he once took for truth was a pack of lies.

That’s the story behind What About the Boy?. My memoir began as little more than private journaling–just recording the facts as they occurred. At that stage, I gave little or no thought to publication. The writing was just an emotional outlet. Later, I thought I might have the makings of a kind of how-to book. This is how we rescued our kid. If your kid has problems, you can do it, too. Well, that idea came and went, but as I dealt with the tail-end of that idea, I realized that what I really had was an emotional journey that ultimately concerned where one turns when one must go somewhere but has no reliable guidance.

Writing often veers off in an unplanned direction, doesn’t it? I sat down here today intending to discuss some of my favorite memoirs, and instead I’ve said what makes memoirs in general interesting. But I would still like to offer a few excellent examples, before becoming totally fixated on promoting my own. Here are three that fit the definition, despite being pretty far apart in subject matter. Please click the links to read the reactions I (and others) have posted on them.

• Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China, by Xiao Di Zhu
• This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, by Vicki Forman
• Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia, by Mark Salzman

What memoirs have you enjoyed?