We Got It Good

December 15th, 2024

Last night was rough. Our four-year-old grandson, Asher, wasn’t feeling well after drinking some warm oat milk. He was tired and his tummy hurt. I laid down next to him in bed and held him. He was close to falling asleep. Then he sat up and burped, but it was much more than just a burp.

Asher threw up on everything: on the bed, on the carpet, on himself, and on me. Within seconds the room was covered in vomit, and Asher was screaming his lungs out. There was a pungent odor of stomach acid and General Tso chicken. It was like a scene from “The Exorcist”.

My wife, Karin, quickly rushed in to help with the cleanup. She pulled our freaked-out preschooler into the bathroom and peeled his slimy clothing off his body. The boy sobbed loudly as she did that. I had the water running in the tub already. I stripped all the bed linen off and dumped it into the washer, along with Asher’s clothes. I had been wearing a pair of ratty jeans. I took my wallet and keys out of the pockets and just threw pants in the trash. I scrubbed the carpet next to bed and tried remove all the debris. After Karin got Asher into clean pajamas, she put on a new bed liner and fitted sheet. Asher calmed down.

Asher and I laid down again. He said that he felt okay. Then suddenly he didn’t feel okay. He vomited in the bed again. Karin and I repeated the cleaning cycle. This time we covered the bed with bath towels before we put Asher down to sleep. That was a good move because the boy still had a little more in him. The third puke fest was easily managed. I just had to replace one of the towels.

The third time was a charm. Asher curled up in my arms. As Asher relaxed, I thought about the evening’s chaos. Actually, what I thought about was how Karin and I would have managed all this if we were living in Gaza or Ukraine or Sudan. If Asher had become violently sick in place where there was no clean water available, how would we have washed him up? What if he had no clothes other than the ones he soiled? What if he needed a doctor? What if there was no place for him to rest, and no time for me to comfort him? I found that caring for a sick little boy was utterly exhausting. Could I have helped him if I was already worn out?

The fact is that Karin and I have all the resources we need to be Asher’s fulltime caregivers. Even when things are difficult, we can manage. Other people, probably millions of other people, cannot. I tried to imagine how it would feel to watch Asher suffer and have no way to ease that suffering. It hurt to even think about that.

Sometimes, like last night, caring for Asher feels overwhelming. I ask myself what I can do for some other caregiver somewhere else who has it worse. I don’t know. Pray for them? Give money to a charity? Probably the best thing I do is to love Asher as much as I can. My primary duty is to that child. God needs me to raise him. That might be all I can really do.

Before Asher finally dozed off last night, he said to me,

“Grandpa, I hear the rain.”

“Yeah, the drops are hitting the skylight. It’s good we are in here where it’s dry.”

Asher replied, “Yeah”.

Then he held me close and fell asleep.