How Should This End?

Strange thoughts from a strange source about my son’s fate

As many of you know, my 19yo son Mitchell has a debilitating and mysterious neurological disease that, without some sort of yet-to-be-identified treatment, is likely and slowly ending his life. He’s been in and out of the hospital for seven years, and is currently “in,” with a serious relapse. Doctors are working hard to keep him breathing, eating, and moving.

While sitting in countless hospital rooms watching this drama play out, all sorts of questions and thoughts and fears and prayers come hither and yon in my mind. One of the more depressing yet interesting questions I find myself wondering is, “How should this end?”

Not “How will this end?” That’s a different question. Nobody knows that. I wonder that, too. But I also wonder, “How should this end?”

You see, everybody’s life is a story, and everybody’s story eventually comes to an earthly end. And I hope you’ll forgive me for wondering, as a nervous parent, how and what should be the end of my son Mitchell’s life. All things considered, what ending would be best?

It’s like “Stranger than Fiction”—one of Mitchell’s favorite movies. Remember the movie? It’s the story of Harold Crick, a numbers-obsessed IRS auditor—played by Will Ferrell. One morning, while walking the 342 steps to the bus, Harold begins hearing a voice in his head, narrating his thoughts and actions. The voice is that of a famous author named Karen Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson. Harold is understandably startled to hear his life narrated in his mind—especially when Eiffel foreshadows that he will be tragically killed by a bus at some point in the near future. That is how Eiffel writes that her protagonist’s story will ultimately end.

Not wanting his life to end this way, Crick tracks down the author and confronts her in her apartment. As shocked as Crick was to hear Eiffel in his head, narrating his life, the author is even MORE shocked to realize that the novel she is writing about Harold Crick is actually true, and that the events she types out are happening in real time. Somehow, she has been given god-like narrative abilities.

It’s an odd but brilliant movie premise. The movie is about fate, and making each moment count, and the power we have over other people as actors in our lives. 

And this is what Eiffel has to wrestle with. She realizes she has a terrible choice to make: should she go through with her plan to tragically kill the main character in her story, knowing he will actually die as a result? Confused, she consults a writer-friend of hers, Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman. Professor Hilbert says that for the story to be a great one, Crick must die. All the best stories are tragic ones. Eiffel waffles, but seems to agree. Even Crick himself comes to accept his fate and tells the author to write the story she has to write. He entrusts himself to the divine Author of his life.

So Eiffel sits down to finish the novel, and Harold’s life. One day, as Harold is standing at a bus stop, “the unthinkable occurs.” A boy falls on his bike in front of an oncoming bus and Harold jumps in the street to save him, getting hit by the bus instead. Bleeding on the pavement, he gasps for his last breath of air. As the author writes, “Harold Crick was de…”

But Eiffel can’t do it.  She can’t kill him off. She can’t finish the sentence. Crick wakes up in a hospital bed in a body cast, but very much alive.

As the novelist later suggests, it might have been better for the story for Harold Crick to die, but not for Harold Crick. Good people like Harold Crick are the kinds of people you want to keep around, story be damned. Harold lives happily ever after. Eiffel’s book becomes another forgettable novel. 

And she’s fine with that.

While trapped here in a hospital room with my ailing son, I’ve found myself thinking about this. There are lots of reasons Mitchell should die. He needs to stop suffering. He needs to go be with Jesus and play basketball and guitar and all the things he used to be able to do. His death could inspire lots of people to take their lives more seriously, and lead others to Christ. Perhaps his untimely passing might help spur the search for new medicines for his mysterious disease. And from a narrative perspective, I actually agree with Professor Hilbert: all the best stories are tragedies. William Wallace had to die. Harry Potter had to die. Obi Wan Kenobi had to die.

And of course Jesus had to die—for the good of many. As he himself says, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

Maybe Mitchell, too, has to die, for reasons we can only imagine.

But he shouldn’t! Good people like Mitchell and Harold Crick shouldn’t die! Bad people should get hit by buses. Bad people should get neurological diseases. Bad people like Voldemort, Hitler, and the orange-haired bully who smacked his gum in my hair on the bus in junior high…THEY should die. The world needs more people like Mitchell to stick around for a while.

So I don’t know who is writing Mitchell’s story. Sometimes it seems like God is, and sometimes the devil. Who knows—maybe Karen Eiffel is writing his story. Honestly, on some days I’m not sure who’s writing this novel. Whoever it is, Michele and I will come to accept whatever fate the Author decides—like Harold Crick. I mean, everybody dies eventually, right? The quicker we can accept that the better our lives will be. Once Harold Crick accepted his fate he learned to relax, stop counting his steps, and fall in love. He learned to enjoy what he had. As we’ve come to accept Mitchell’s fate and ours, we’ve actually grown as people.

But dammit, we’d still prefer a different ending! An ending different than the one it seems we’re watching slowly play out, and agonizingly so. As good as it might be for the story for Mitchell to “move on,” he’s not ready for that and neither are we. There are tales from his life yet to tell, experiences yet to relate. There are comic moments yet to recount, romances yet to write down, successes and failures yet to describe. There are movies yet to watch.

So I ask you, Dear Author of our son’s fate, type a different ending. Reconsider this earthly conclusion. Save Mitchell from the bus. We are grateful for every moment you give us with him here on earth, before and when he joins the saints in the new heavens and earth. Until then, we’re with him to the bitter end.

We just hope this is not it.

-MRH (9/15/2019)