Last February my son Elias, named after the prophet and the saint and the mountain, was playing power forward in a high school basketball game. We were winning, and the coach was about to put in the second string. But then our team got a steal and launched the ball to Elias on a breakaway.
He had been working on his dunk since he was 11, and it’s now a reliable piece of his arsenal. But dunking is hard in a game. So when you get a rare chance, you need to practice. And so he took three steps and launched to the basket, slamming the ball home, and hanging on just a little too long.
He swung out under the rim, landed at an odd angle, and collapsed. One of my principles as a parent is to let the coach and the trainer do their thing. Kids get hurt, it’s usually something minor, and there’s no need for helicopter parents to rush onto the court. But I spent years as a volunteer medic on a rural ambulance service, and I know the difference between a tweak and a real injury. This was bad, and I rand down.
Elias’s leg was horribly distorted, and his kneecap was dislocated — an extremely painful injury. He was breathless, in agony. My wife held his hand and helped him breathe. He blew most of the ligaments in his knee, damaged the patella, and was out for the season. When his surgeon walked out of the operating room, an hour later than planned, he looked pale. “I’d never seen an injury like that,” he said. He used a cadaver ligament to do the repair.
Over the winter Elias worked with a wonderful, creative, and kind physical therapist from Minnesota, starting a few days after surgery. We quickly weaned him off oxycodone. In the icy Colorado winter, he used crutches for six weeks. I wrote the family of the ligament donor: “Your son helped Elias walk again.”
Elias said he saw new things in the world, the purple sunrise on the way to therapy; a club with Latino friends, cooking authentic food. All along, we talked about “first world problems,” like this athletic injury, as opposed to the real issues worldwide; Israel, Gaza, Haiti, or Sudan. We talked about perspective. About privilege. Only 10 months out from his injury, on the night of the presidential election, Elias ate three slices of pizza and headed off to basketball practice.
My wife and I watched the results roll out with several friends who are political experts and climate activists, just like me. We looked on in shock as the dials ticked up toward a Harris defeat. I felt a physical sickness creep into my stomach. My daughter Willa, a philosophy major, called in despair. I tried to comfort her on the phone, still feeling the visceral pain of dropping her off at college three years ago, when I physically couldn’t let her go. I still can’t.
Things got worse as the night progressed. I couldn’t imagine the next four years. I worried about: community, humanity, and health; attacks on the Department of Education and vaccines; Ukraine; women suffering in medical purgatory, and deportation camps.
Elias has a Latino friend who is beloved by his peers. He’s autistic and cripplingly shy. After the election he said: “I’m going to get deported.” For him to be sent back to Honduras would be no different than sending Elias: he has no connections.
There will be real consequences for public lands too, for greenhouse gas emissions, for the deficit nobody seems to care about but which will cripple Willa and Elias’s future. The head of the EPA doesn’t believe climate science.
When Elias came home from practice, alarmingly, he had a deep, boxer’s cut under his eye. “An elbow. Took me by surprise.”
The wound was gaping, the kind that produces a scar. I washed my hands, dabbed the cut with betadine. Cut small pieces of tape and gently pulled the edges together as Elias closed his eyes. I pressed the tape down gently, ensuring the adhesive stuck. I put my hand on his head, as I have done since he was a newborn slick with amniotic fluid; and when he cried on discovering that gnomes were not real; and when I hugged him on getting his first hit in Little League.
I thought of America’s constant pursuit of ideals that at the same time acknowledges our imperfections; not greatness, but a “more perfect union.” I thought of Elias’ friend, and remembered my Catholic friend’s reminder of how a society is measured, quoting Matthew: “For he who is least among you is the one who is great.”
Elias opened his eyes.
“You will be OK”
“And you will have a scar.”
Auden Schendler’s new book Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul comes out this month. He lives in western Colorado with his family and is writing in his personal capacity.
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