Bruce the Blog

What kind of persons would decline attending a Pulitzer-winning play about a married couple because, in the play-no-goers’ exact words, “I’m afraid.” What sort of domestic drama — save for Tennessee Williams’s verbally violent “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” —- could instill such fear?

The singular answer: People who recently lost a child not wanting to watch a play about people who recently lost a child. To that explanation might be added … by a writer who had the enviable task of only having to imagine such a merciless fate.

Elyse and I and our college-sophomore daughter Elissa lost Harrison 2,427 days ago, on March 21, 2003. My son died within 24 hours after the date I was born. That’s not a coincidence; that’s ironic, a word often misused to mean coincidence. But it’s irony by design, because March 20, 2003 was the earliest of several operating dates offered us by heart surgeon Dr. Thomas Spray at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP: an ironic name for a medical institution). We jumped at the chance for the open-heart surgery to occur on my birthday because — irony alert — we superstitiously believed it was a good omen. We were half right; in retrospect, it was an ominous date with destiny.

“Rabbit Hole” by David Lindsay-Abaire, about a couple coping with the most primal loss of all, is at Hudson Stage in Briarcliff Manor. We are seeing it tonight (Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009, two weeks before we observe Harrison’s 22nd birthday, I write with tear ducts beginning to moisten. Our ritual is to visit his gravesite and bring birthday balloons, a paradoxically mournful totem that reaches toward the firmament where our curious culture makes believe spirits of loved ones reside forevemore, when their actual remains lie six feet below. That’s ironic). I’ll post a blogview of it Sunday, Nov. 15.

Because Hudson Stage, located at Pace University in Briarcliff Manor, is around the corner from our friends Doug and Linda Press, we called them to inquire about having pre-show dinner at a nearby bistro. Turned out they were seeing Broadway musical “Next to Normal” about — what else — the loss of a child. That’s a coincidence, but an ironic one.

Even the locale of Harrison’s demise is somewhat ironic, because he was born in Philadelphia (Nov. 29, 1987) in what would be the last few months of the three years we lived there before moving back to New York when the entertainment magazine I helped launch folded after the stock market folded in October of that year. The only reason Harrison’s final act of three open-hearts was performed in Philadelphia is because the renowned pediatric cardiology Dutch surgeon who presided over his second — an artificial valve implant in 1998 — refused to do the third. Dr. Jan Quagebeur offered Harrison’s parents the sub-zero chilly but subsequently truthful explanation, “I don’t think Harrison has a bright future.”

Perhaps even more than his actual passing — for which I was fully prepared, haunted appropriately by the surgeon’s prognosis, having previsualized The End of Harrison more than once in fitful bouts of doubled-over convulsions fraught with inconsolable sobbing, the likes of which I fear ever again having to experience — the pathetic state Elyse and I were in walking out of Dr. Q’s office that cold day in January 2003, then staring out into the void in the breezeway of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on Broadway and 158th Street as the valet fetched our car, is one moment I can’t bear to revisit, along with the final moments at Harrison’s bedside, when, in his drug-induced hallucinations, he said deeply unnerving things to me I’ve never shared with anyone but Elyse, and probably won’t divulge until the inevitable play or book about him is completed, by someone who’s been to Hell and back rather than taking a virtual round trip.

The aforementioned people who would rather not see “Rabbit Hole” with us tonight are members of the bimonthly bereavment group Caring Circle Elyse attends regularly. She asked others in the group if they wanted to go. Alas, their loss is too raw, within the past year or two, to endure two and a half hours of what they are sentenced to endure the rest of their lives: adventures in grieving.

It’s a 24/7 job that never takes a second’s rest. Everything you do. Everything you are. Everything you become. It all derives from losing not only part of your parental identity, but losing something so deep inside you — in the bottomless pit of your stomach — that it can be replaced by a soul-devouring demon that transfigures your entire being into a dysfunctional, unrecognizable mess if you let it.

Elyse and I are going to “Rabbit Hole” because we believe we can withstand the grim spectacle after 6-1/2 years. Maybe even learn a little something about ourselves from how someone imagines people like us to behave with each other and with others. We’ll see if that is the case or if we have to watch the show through a saline screen and a soundtrack of sniffles. Regardless of how long it’s been, as child-losing parents are wont to say, the pain doesn’t leave, but rather you learn pain management of the emotional kind. I attend the Caring Circleg once in a rare while because my pain management dosage is administered through the Harrison Apar Field of Dreams Foundation, now my life’s work.

Dr. Quagebeur’s prescient expert analysis notwithstanding, Harrison’s future has remained bright, enlightened by his radiant spirit that glows for all to see through the Foundation that proudly bears his name and his image.