We are able to navigate the world knowing these things happen. My chaplaincy supervisor once told me, “Children have always died. It is natural.” That may be true, but I can’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it sitting in the windowless family room, and I can’t accept it now, as a father myself.

When the kid finally went upstairs to the ICU and his parents followed, I walked to the break room to get a cup of coffee, and the doctor was in there, her face hovering over a trash can that she’d been vomiting into. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You did good with them. Thanks for being kind to them. I think it helped.” She dry heaved for a while and then said, “That kid’s gonna die and I know his last words. I know the last thing he’ll ever say.” I didn’t ask her to tell me what it was, and she didn’t volunteer.

A week later, I finished the chaplaincy program, and decided not to go to divinity school. I told everyone it was because I didn’t want to learn Greek, which was true, but it was also true that I couldn’t cope with the memory of this kid. I still can’t cope with it. I thought about him every day. I prayed for him every day, even after I stopped praying about anything else. Every night, still, I say his name and ask God for mercy. Whether I believe in God isn’t really relevant. I do believe, however tenuously, in mercy.

As an inveterate googler, I knew I could have just looked up his name, but I was too scared. To google would have been to know, one way or another. I’m reminded of that great line from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.”

The months of not knowing became years, then more than a decade. And then one morning not long ago, I typed the kid’s name into the search bar. It’s an unusual name, easy pickings for Google. I hit enter. The first link was to a Facebook. I clicked over, and there he was. Eighteen years old, a decade and a half removed from the one night we spent together.

He is alive.

He is growing up, finding his way in the world, documenting a life that is more public than he probably realizes. But how can I not be grateful for knowing, even if the only way to know is to lose our autonomy over our so-called selves? He is alive. He likes John Deere tractors, and is a member of the Future Farmers of America, and he is alive.

Scrolling through his friends, I find his parents’ profiles, and discover that they are still married. He is alive. He likes terrible, overly manufactured country music. He is alive. He calls his girlfriend his bae. Alive. Alive. Alive.