Saving Noah

by Lucinda Berry

I used to be afraid we’d reach this point—the place where we’d moved so far away from each other that we couldn’t come back together. But now that it had happened, it wasn’t nearly as awful as I imagined it’d be. The person I knew and loved was gone.

We were fundamentally different. Maybe we always had been.

If there is a God, I pray you aren’t the one to find me.

“What if I was dying of cancer? Would you help me die if I had cancer and was only going to suffer by being alive?” “That’s entirely different. You don’t have cancer.” He gave me a halfhearted smile. “You’re right. I’ve got something worse. At least when you have cancer people still love you.”

Was his condition any less vile, debilitating and dignity-robbing than brain cancer?

He gulped it all in hungrily like he was taking pictures to bring with him. The lake. The sun. Feeling the water on his skin like he did when he was a baby. He was completely enthralled. I’d never seen him look so alive.

“Dear God, please help us. Help my baby boy. Let this be easy. Please let him leave this world in peace.” A sob caught in my throat. “And please meet him there. Take care of him for me.”

After he died, it was like I’d been speeding in a car going ninety miles per hour and somebody opened the door and threw me out. I stood in the road profoundly disoriented as the world spun around me while I stayed still.

I’d found my way back to God, a place I never thought I’d be again. It wasn’t out of a deep faith or a profound spiritual experience, but out of pure necessity to believe God existed. If he didn’t exist and this was the end, then I never got to see Noah again, and I refused to believe that. There had to be a God, because there had to be a heaven. A time when I got to see him again, and he was the one to walk me home.