My wife Judy had been married before we got together. That prior union was tumultuous and short, and the only thing she took away from it was the memory of some hurtful words her first husband had said during one of their arguments. He’d predicted that she would make a lousy mother.

I don’t know what prompted him to say that. I knew her during the time they were married, and was aware of nothing that might have supported his prediction. Maybe he was simply trying to hurt her.

Because I knew him as well, I doubt he meant to inflict lasting harm. He was no more malicious than anyone else, and at one time or another probably everyone utters mean, divisive or negative words.

That’s what I want to write about, because despite the old epigram about sticks and stones, words can indeed hurt.

A disabled child

A year or so after their divorce was final, Judy and I married. And then, some years after that, we had our only child, a boy we named Joseph.

Looking back, I realize that Judy had not been eager to become a mother. We’d seldom discussed the notion of having babies. We concentrated on our careers, on fixing up our house, and on pasttimes such as community theatre and square dancing. Then one day, inspired by the sight of happy families playing with their kids in the park, I suggested that we go ahead and see what parenthood would be like. An expression of panic crossed Judy’s face; but when she saw that I was serious, she nervously agreed that it was the right thing to do. Within an hour, we were both completely sold on the idea of bringing a new life into the world.

Long before we had any physical evidence that he was coming, both of us loved our child and couldn’t wait to see him.

Joseph entered this world with problems. He couldn’t keep his food down. He cried almost constantly. He grew older but did not achieve any of the usual developmental milestones, such as crawling. Despite multiple evaluations and tests, the doctors did not understand what was wrong. Therefore, they also did not know what could be done for him.

My response in that frightening first year and a half was to continue taking Joseph to his appointments, ever hopeful that the doctors would eventually identify the cause of his distress and send us to the right specialist. I trusted that somebody, somewhere, would have the expertise to get our little guy fixed up.

Judy lost patience with that. She believed, correctly, that time was of the essence, and that the longer Joseph waited for help, the less effective any help would be. Since mainstream medical professionals were doing nothing for him, she began exploring options with alternative providers. At first, I objected. I believed anyone not in the mainstream must have been excluded for good reason. But my misgivings were no match for her determination.

One line of inquiry led to another, and before long Joseph was the patient of a kindly old osteopathic doctor who specialized in the arcane science of cranial therapy. This treatment finally put an end to Joseph’s irritability and frequent vomiting. In turn, the outcome put an end to my doubts about Judy’s course of action. Thus encouraged, we found our way into an arduous and controversial home therapy program that offered hope of overcoming his developmental delays.

Years passed, and Joseph achieved some wonderful milestones. The most obvious was finally learning to walk independently. But he never attained the total wellness that we had pursued so earnestly. For reasons that are still unknown, he never acquired the ability to talk.

A quest for answers

One bit of wisdom the doctors had always stressed was that parents of kids who have developmental problems should not blame themselves.

Even so, Judy and I could not avoid examining our backgrounds and our selves for an explanation of our son’s condition. We found little. Still, in weak moments Judy confessed to me that she worried about her first husband’s comment. She feared he had perceived something that we did not. She dearly wanted to try again, to have another baby, but was terrified that there might be something about her that would afflict any child born to her.

I can only guess at the emotional depths to which this unresolved question drove my wife.

However, if any blame were to be assigned, the person most obviously free of it had to be our son. He’d done nothing to bring about his misfortune. Therefore, even after exhausting all the good ideas for helping him, we still felt we had a duty to keep trying. There would be no further children in our family, but Judy and I meant to do anything possible that might enable Joseph to move another step or two along the way toward independence.

For example, just as Judy had led the charge in finding alternative healthcare providers, she also began exhorting me to recognize the importance of speaking words in support of desired outcomes. Any time I became discouraged, she cited Scripture, urging me to “call things that be not as though they are.”

The words we speak, she said, have enormous power to hurt or to heal, because our subconscious mind hears and acts on them. The best use of our words, she insisted, is to give encouragement and comfort, and to remind the hearer that things can be better.

We’d spent a great deal of time over the years discussing what was wrong; but now, she decided, we needed to guard what we said. We needed to focus on what was right. Joseph desperately needed to hear it, and so did we.

Perhaps it was too late by then. Perhaps constructive language could not reverse a process that by then was already well under way. Perhaps understanding these things intellectually did not cancel out what occurred on an emotional level. At any rate, instead of seeing improvement in Joseph, Judy herself fell ill, and two years later she died.

Our little guy was nine years old when he lost her.

As for the ultimate cause of his mysterious condition, it’s possible to look for explanations where they don’t exist. One doctor had told us that, whatever had gone awry with Joseph’s development, it was something that “just happened.” As for our response, I do think that our love for him provided ample motivation for the choices we made. There’s no need to attribute our efforts to help him to a sense of guilt. On the other hand, I have no trouble believing that Judy was also motivated in part by a desire to prove, once and for all, that she was a good mother. Even if she was the only person needing that proof.

If that was the case, the effort cost her everything.

Sometimes we can only speculate. I don’t know why Judy died at an early age. But it would be a good policy for all of us to consider the possible consequences of our words before we speak them. Lives may be at stake.

This article was originally published by Utterly Frank.

I first encountered Mark Salzman’s writing when participating in a memoir writers’ critique group that met over a period of a couple years. The group leader suggested Lost in Place as a good example of the genre. I thought it was a wonderful book, and (after finishing my own memoir) went on to read his other works.

Along the way I decided that Salzman is a writer whom I would particularly enjoy meeting and getting to know. Perhaps that’s because, as he mentions in this more recent memoir, his characters, real and fictional alike, are “tormented by the gap between who they actually are and who they had hoped to become.” It’s likely that everybody in the modern age experiences that disconnect to some degree. I certainly do. In this book he shows, more explicitly than before, and with much humor at his own expense, that it’s true of himself. His achievements, while pretty darned impressive from where I sit, do not impress him.

To some extent, that’s due to having set rather lofty goals. He says, regarding his adolescent ambition of attaining true enlightenment: “Wise people adjust their expectations. They stop comparing themselves to Buddha or Batman and trust themselves to achieve their personal best. Not me; I was not going to capitulate … I was not going to be a quitter.”

That is precisely the way I felt about the campaign I waged for several years to rescue my little boy from a mysterious developmental disability. Didn’t matter how difficult the task became, or how many discouraging comments I heard. I intended for us to reach our objective!

Popular culture encourages that kind of thinking, through all the familiar stories about the underdog who finally prevails against overwhelming odds. And I’m not prepared to say that’s a bad thing. We should hitch our wagon to a star.

But somehow we also need to find a perspective that allows us to survive reality without coming unglued. Maintaining that perspective requires work every day, and some days a lot of work. The Man in the Empty Boat focuses mainly on 2009, an unusually difficult year for Salzman (and for me, come to think of it). During that year he began suffering debilitating panic attacks (although he didn’t know what was happening and reasonably supposed death could be imminent), he was compelled by the family to accept a very objectionable pet into his life, and worst of all he witnessed his sister’s death, described here in agonizing detail. At the lowest point, he admits:

“At that moment, I asked myself: If there was a button I could press, and I knew that pressing it would make every human being on the planet disappear instantly, painlessly, forever, without a trace, so that the whole bonfire of fear and hope and confusion and pain would be over with, once and for all–would I press it? My own children, I reminded myself, would dissolve along with everyone else. Everything dear to me, and everything dear to everyone else would disappear. So would beauty, courage, love, tenderness, curiosity, ambition, art, science, technology, history, knowledge, consciousness–all of it would be erased. Would I press that button?
God yes, I thought. I would press it in a heartbeat. And I felt truly sorry that no such button existed.”

He returns to that thought in the concluding chapters, first using it as a framework for a new understanding of life (actually, we are all in the process of disappearing–albeit very slowly) and finally, after considerable thought, promising that the button has lost its appeal.

One admirable aspect of Salzman’s life that he scarcely mentions here is his music. According to his official biography, ability to play the cello facilitated his acceptance to Yale at age 16, and he has played with Yo-Yo Ma at Lincoln Center. (By way of contrast, a previous blog post covers what I’ve done with music.) I’m also envious of his fluency in Mandarin (my progress in that language plateaued long ago) and, to be blunt, of the fact that money doesn’t appear to be too much of a consideration in the life portrayed here. I suppose, in wishing to know him, I really want to understand the path to enjoying the blessings he has, even if more would have been nice.

But sometimes, at least, answers come unexpectedly, from unlikely sources. One clue presents itself at the end of The Man in the Empty Boat, conveyed with Salzman’s trademark humor and reliably vivid writing. I now think he has spelled it all out as clearly as is possible.

We try. All of us.

In one way or another, wisely or not, effectively or not, most of us endeavor to do more than just plod through our days, passively accepting whatever bones or brickbats fate tosses our way. We seek to make the bad things less bad, the good things better, and ideally sometimes even to bring about some wonderful or fulfilling enhancement that’s all our own.

To a huge extent, my efforts have been connected in some way with the massive brickbat that prevented my firstborn son from having options in life. That adventure prompted the writing of WATB and most of the content you see on this blog.

But there are other corners of life as well—areas that might have benefited from a little more attention, had that been feasible. Perhaps you’ll like this little reminiscence.

Finding Joy in Treble Clef

My father was a violinist from what I think of as “the old German school,” and by that I mean to say he took a very stern, no-nonsense approach to playing. I know he did enjoy listening to good music. But when Dad picked up his own instrument, pleasure seemed to be the last thing on his mind. His focus remained on technique. Was that left arm supple enough? Were those fingers consistently coming down on the strings like little hammers? Although an accomplished musician ought to have progressed beyond such challenges, Dad had begun noting the effects of arthritis. He believed he might slow the progress of that malady through painstaking attention to every detail when playing. So he practiced by the hour—but only scales and etudes. I don’t recall hearing him play actual pieces. Surely, music must have meant more to him at an earlier point in life, but that would have been before my time.

Dad gave me my first lessons in the violin, and he made darn sure I never formed any of the typical beginner’s bad habits. The palm of my left hand never, ever contacted the neck. The instrument remained parallel with the floor. And that bow grip: just so! Then of course there was mastery of time signatures and keys and all those other wickets that he said separated respectable players from the pretenders.

This background enabled me to elicit appreciative nods from subsequent teachers.

But something important was missing in my understanding of music. Let’s call it joy. I practiced with the school orchestra in the same frame of mind that I took to math class. Eventually I noted that only one of those activities was actually required. As a teenager, I gave up playing.

Some years later I had a little epiphany while watching a friend playing guitar at a square dance. That guy looked just as happy as it’s possible for anyone to be, and obviously his happiness came from the creation of music. This, I realized, is what music is really about: calling forth the appreciation of life in yourself and others.

Yes, technique makes all the difference in producing the sounds we want to hear. On the other hand, good musicians know that “playing by the book” is a soulless pastime.

Adults have complex lives, with competing obligations and little free time, but I wanted to get back into music. Fearful of slipping into the same old groove, I switched to guitar. Much later, I began piano lessons. I enjoyed both instruments, but over time realized that they just weren’t my instruments. Finally, in 2008, I picked up the violin once again, after having been away from it 40 years.

Guess what, Dad? I still had the muscle memory for holding and playing it correctly (albeit without much panache). Some things we never forget.

Today, music evokes a sort of bittersweet affection. The violin feels like a girlfriend from whom I’ve been separated all my life. I cannot avoid wondering what we might have done together. But on the other hand I’m raising a couple of kids who now play it as well, one of whom is already better than either my father or me. It’s an honor, and a responsibility, to be able to influence the trajectory they take.

If they absorb just one thing about music from me, I hope it’s love.