Authors: Kevin Malarkey; Alex Malarkey
She said, “I really was wondering if you could fill out some paperwork.”
“Well,” I said, “I have a special situation. I’ve recently switched to a medical expense sharing group, and to be frank, I’m not exactly sure where things stand.”
I was embarrassed. We had used hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of hospital time, facilities, and surgical practice. Unbeknownst to me, it would be millions before long, and I wasn’t clear on where the money was going to come from.
“I understand,” she said. “But don’t you want to check into Medicaid?”
“I don’t know much about how those things work, but isn’t it for, you know, people who are truly poor? I can’t imagine that we would qualify.”
“People often think that,” she explained. “They’re often surprised by how it works out—particularly when they have a large number of children. Don’t you have four? Each child raises the income limit.”
“I had no idea.”
It didn’t take long for me to crunch the numbers, and it turned out that, given my current income and the arrival of Ryan in November, we fit just under the limit for Medicaid. What a weight suddenly flew off my shoulders! Medicaid would pay every penny of Alex’s bill, and the coverage would be retroactive to November 1, 2004, for the entire family. We owed more than $10,000 for Ryan’s birth, and just like that it would be taken care of.
I had already received two bills that totaled $200,000. The aggregate total of medical costs ended up well into seven figures. What I owed out of pocket to Children’s Hospital was a grand total of $14, which, it turned out, was an accounting error. I didn’t even owe that much!
How can I describe my feelings? Overwhelmed. Grateful. Humble. Ashamed.
Yes, Lord, You’ve made Your point—again
, I prayed.
I carry all this burden of worry, and You cover everything in Your plans. I haven’t understood that my income struggles and my drop in salary were part of Your perfect plan! The amount of my loss is far exceeded by the bills that I don’t have to face—and even if I’d still used traditional insurance, it would have combined with Medicaid and still left me with a massive bill that could take many years to pay. But You knew in advance how to bless us. Why can’t I ever learn to walk in faith, to trust Your will?
Out of the Prison of Self-Pity
My dad, as usual, put it best: “If you weren’t broke, you’d be bankrupt.”
He had a point. As a matter of fact, I never knew him not to have one. My father has the wisest advice of anyone who has ever counseled me.
During the early part of our experience with Alex and the accident, Dad offered me his perspective once again, and it served me well. When the accident occurred, he was speaking at a medical conference in Europe. He quickly flew home to Ohio. As soon as he spotted me at the hospital, he put his arm around me and said, “Son, many people in the world would love for this to be their worst problem.”
I realize many people just don’t get that point of view, and some would say that he was being insensitive with this comment. But I knew my dad. His incredible perspective on life and what is really important gives him amazing power in everyday living. How many times did I come to him with a problem when I was growing up? And how many times did he patiently listen and offer good advice? But I knew every single time what I was going to hear before I left the room—he would always bring up someone we both knew who was struggling in life to help me better comprehend the scope of my own problem.
I came to understand the wisdom of this approach. Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow. Awareness of others is a healthy antidote to this self-focus.
We’re not the only ones with issues, and usually our own struggles are far from the worst we know about. There is never a moment in life when it’s impossible to have a heart filled with gratitude—no matter what happens. A catastrophic event, such as our accident, puts that philosophy to the test. But even then it’s true, and Dad dared to apply it as his grandson lay in the valley of the shadow of death.
I didn’t need to know just how unfortunate I was. I needed to be reminded of the truth: my struggles were far from the only ones out there, and I still had much to be grateful for. I can’t imagine any outlook on life that is wiser or more grounded. I recall sitting in the waiting room of the ICU, watching news of the tsunami that hit Indonesia at the end of the year. Nearly 230,000 people in about a dozen countries were killed; 43,000 of them simply vanished without a trace.
I sat in my chair at the hospital and watched the TV screen as a home floated along the coast. I thought to myself,
I still have Alex, who is alive by the grace of God. I still have my home
.Okay, that home needed some major repairs, but I still had it. And even when my house crunched under the force of the tree trunk, I could still say, “Many people all over the world would love for this to be their worst day.”
My dad doesn’t believe in the existence of a bad day. I find that holding this philosophy makes a great difference in our state of contentment. The tougher life became, the more good we saw in people and in God.
It’s possible to know peace and pain at the same time, believe it or not. Life can be rough yet still feel right. Even as I wept at times, I knew my family was aligned with the will of God. I could say, with the old hymn,
It is well with my soul
.
Even so, in moments of reflection, I’ve asked myself,
Do you wish the accident had never happened?
That’s an easy call. Yes—and no. From a strictly human or physical perspective, of course I wish that the accident had never happened! But I am not merely a mass of molecules, incoherently careening through time and space. I am a child of God, destined for another world, a world before which this one pales in significance. Our spiritual preparation for the
next
world is to be the priority of
this
life. As the accident has brought Alex and me—and untold thousands—a deeper life with God, then my answer to this question has to be different. I have chosen to view the accident as integral to my life.
What if we could go back and rewrite the scripts for our lives? With what I know now, I could avoid a lot of pain by bypassing the future laid out for me. But I would also be sidestepping the countless blessings of God, present and future. I could never have peace about that.
It’s not a matter of God’s planning for my son to suffer, but of God’s planning to use all of this to do wonderful things that bless many lives—my son and the rest of my family included. Nothing good ever comes to pass without a price. It’s a very difficult thing to understand, but ask yourself, what if Jesus—who
did
have foreknowledge of His crucifixion—had turned and walked away?
I hate pain and suffering, especially when it affects those I love more than anything else in this world. But I trust God; I trust Him implicitly to turn sadness into joy and mourning into dancing. I can’t wait to watch Alex dance!
Can Alex Hear Us?
Beth and I were with Alex every day, but we knew his siblings would eventually need to see him too. Determining the right timing was a tough judgment call. It would be hard for them to understand why Alex would not be able to talk to them or play with them, and he was in a strange room with lots of scary machinery.
A few weeks into Alex’s coma, we decided to bring Aaron to see his brother. At four, he was the sibling closest to Alex in both age and friendship. Alex had a few friends, but his best buddy was always Aaron. They were inseparable. In fact, from ages four to six we have almost no pictures of Alex without Aaron. Doesn’t that say it all? They played sports together, they played with action figures together, they ran around outside together, they climbed trees together, and, yes, they disobeyed their parents together!
We spent time talking with Aaron, preparing him for the experience. In our “parental wisdom,” we told him Alex was sleeping. While we spoke to Alex all the time, hoping that on some level he could hear and understand, we didn’t want Aaron to have unrealistic expectations.
Aaron was keen on bringing Alex a gift: a G.I. Joe action figure. We told him we thought that was a fine idea. Beth and I had a friend, “Mr. Jeff,” who was also close to our children. He accompanied Aaron and me, carrying Aaron in his arms, and the three of us entered Alex’s room.
My radar was on high alert, keeping a close eye on Aaron. How would he handle this strange setting for his beloved big brother? In the wonderful way of a child, he took it all in stride and was delighted to see Alex. It’s so easy to underestimate what children can handle.
We held Aaron above the reclining body of his brother, and he began showing Alex the cool toy he’d brought him. In better times, the two of them had loved playing together with action figures. In many ways, Alex had been the ideal big brother for a little boy. I wondered just how difficult it was for Aaron on the inside, how much he was missing his favorite playmate.
“See how G.I. Joe can move his legs? He’s running!” said Aaron, manipulating the limbs on the action figure and making all the appropriate sound effects. “See, he has the kung-fu grip!”
He demonstrated all the features of the toy just as if the two of them were alone, having a great time as they always had.
I should have been satisfied with Aaron’s relaxed, happy demeanor, but I couldn’t keep myself from worrying that at some point, Aaron’s little heart might be hurt because big brother Alex remained unresponsive. In as gentle and nurturing a way as I could, I said, “Remember, Aaron, your brother is asleep. He can’t hear you.”
Aaron turned around, looking me straight in the eye, and announced with absolute confidence, “He can hear me.”
He was only four, but he spoke with all the assurance of one who had all the facts. He turned back around as if to say,
What is it about these things that adults just don’t get?
and continued demonstrating the action figure’s features to comatose Alex.
I might as well have told him the sky was green. “What are you talking about, the sky is green? Anyone can see the sky is blue. Of course Alex can hear me.”
Jeff and I simply looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders. Can a child see and understand certain things that skeptical adult minds can’t?
Miracles at Christmas
The world never slows down to accommodate a family crisis. Our lives remained an absolute blur of appointments, discussions, and medications, even as a myriad of people cared for our other children and many of our own needs. The one constant around which everything swirled was Alex in his long sleep. It had been a month since our full family of six had occupied one room at the same time.
Even as Alex was inches away in body but worlds away in spirit, we began to prepare him for his own return to life. We remained confident it would happen, so we believed we had to prepare. Very gently, we’d lift him from his bed and place him in a wheelchair for short periods of time, a painstaking, methodical process. First we would move him to the edge of the bed so that his legs dangled over the side. Beth would slide behind him, both to support him and to give him big hugs. What was at first a series of carefully executed moves became another routine in our lives.
One day, something changed. As Beth went through the process, Alex’s lips formed into a slight but unmistakable smile. We looked at each other to confirm that we hadn’t imagined it. Our son was smiling. We looked at each other in amazement as tears of joy began to flow. God was so good to give us this little encouraging sign. Maybe Aaron was right:
What do you mean he can’t hear us?
But it turned out to be only a momentary flash, and Alex was off again to somewhere we couldn’t go.
At Christmas, we paused to consider that it had been six weeks since the accident. In some ways, it seemed like six years. For the first time, the hospital allowed us to bring all the children into Alex’s room. For the third day ever, all six of us were in one place. We were able to open a few presents together and to take a family Christmas picture.
It’s another idea that is difficult to explain unless you’ve walked in our shoes, but this was one of my best Christmases ever. By now, we had learned to take nothing for granted. Our son was in a coma, our new home was in shambles, and the presence of God was more real to us than ever before. Just being together was itself a special gift from God. We held each other close and prayed that the Lord would bring us even closer—to one another and to Him—in 2005.