daron aric hagen

This year, with my healthy, joyful son taking his first steps, I have felt Daron’s presence even more intensely than in the past. Daron Aric Hagen was born on 26 January 1960 at the Evangelical Deaconess Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He weighed six pounds and ventured into this world at 2:55 AM – during one of the day’s smallest, coldest hours.

His poor heart: he arrived with congenital heart disease, atresia (absence or closure of a natural passage or channel of the body) of the aortic orifice, hypoplasia (a condition of arrested development in which an organ or part remains below the normal size or in an immature state) of the left atrium (the main part of the left auricle) and the left ventricle (the chamber which receives blood from the left auricle and forces it into the arteries).

Despite this, Daron lived for four days – long enough to be baptized, and to develop some sort of impression of his parents and of the world; certainly, long enough to have been held by them, and for them to have given to him, completely and without reservation, their hearts.

I write this based on notes written on a copy of the postmortem examination, notes written in my father’s hand. Before dying of heart disease, he disposed of very nearly every personal effect, and would have managed to erase this artifact of his interior, personal life as well, had my mother not given it to me just before she died.

Probably my father jotted the words I am looking at right now on the yellowed sheet of tissue used back then when generating carbon copies on a typewriter so that he could explain to my mother, recovering in another room in the hospital, what had happened. In the lower left-hand corner, in pencil, is written ‘Cause? German measles. Unknown. Flu.’

One of my most potent childhood memories is of finding this document among my parents’ papers. I was old enough to read, and I read my name; I read that I was dead, and I wondered how this could be true. A sense of displacement – the earliest whisps of being able to imagine adult woe, of my parents before me, of me after them; of secrets, of things so personal that they are never discussed.

For a long time, I kept the embryonic awareness of self, the sweetness and the sadness of it that were awakened by the discovery of the other Daron, secret. When I asked my mother to explain, she smiled, and told me that I had been given his name in his honor, that I was living for two, and to not be sad, that she missed him, but that she felt him with her always, always. We never spoke of him again, but he has always, always been with me.

About a decade ago in Pittsburgh, my wife (who I was then commuting from New York to court) and I were having dinner in an intimate little Japanese restaurant called Nobu. Returning from the restroom, she asked me who the happy little boy was she had seen out of the corner of her eye sitting next to me. There had been, in reality, no boy. I believed then (as I still do) that she saw not the boy but rather, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the boy himself. That was when I told her this story. Someday I will share it with my son, hoping it will help him a little to understand his father.