Reasoning
When Jess was growing up, his mother never seemed to stop worrying. Once he felt old enough, he offered, “Why worry if it doesn’t improve or solve whatever you’re worried about?” “You just wait,” she said. Now she lay on her deathbed, and he worried he couldn’t reach her — late-stage dementia. How could he help her if she couldn’t make sense? Maybe that’s a good thing, he told himself. If she doesn’t know she’s dying, she can’t suffer. Reasoning, though, fell to Confusion may affect how or where she lands in her next life, and I want her to land well. What can I do? One afternoon, while his mother silently stared at the hospital wall from her bed, Jess remembered a story she often told him when he was little. He’d forgotten about the story, probably because, when told, he dropped off before she finished it or she never explained its meaning to him, if he ever asked. “There was a curious little girl,” she would begin, “who one day wandered away from …” The alarm on his mother’s monitor sounded, and two nurses scrambled into her room. They yanked the privacy curtain around her, then asked him to please step outside and … he knew the drill. Seated in the waiting room, he worried, Is this it, the big one? He returned, however, to the story interrupted by the alarm. His mother’s little girl had wandered away from “her village and into a vast, open field. Snow squalls suddenly swept in. She looked homeward in search of a return, but saw only that curtains of snow had already closed upon trees, houses, and neighbors standing somewhere moments before. So she turned the squalls into exactly what they looked like to her: giant jellyfish.” End of story. Only now, Jess understood. For his mother, a time of innocence; too young to know danger, so no fear, so no worry. So, it wasn’t What can I do? but This is what I’ll do: turn the moment into exactly what it looks like to me — exactly what Jess now did. Those jellyfish were toll-taking swaths, a world threat. They swallowed everything in their path. Observing one battlefront, white-coated scientists and doctors moaned, “Humans shouldn’t end this way,” and horrified citizens pleaded to the white coats, “Do something now. Don’t leave us like this.” The white coats, though, did as they always did, flew to a secret, far-off mountaintop lab to find a way to blow those jellyfish to kingdom come. Meanwhile, his mother, still squall-blinded in an open field, arrived at the back of an abandoned industrial building, a loading dock, and an emergency door into the lab. Opening the door, she didn’t set off any alarms, just blinking experts’ eyes adjusting to a little girl seemingly entering out of nowhere; adjusting, also, to the clear, azure sky and glistening field of fresh snow dropped behind her. “You can stop your worries,” she told the experts, as she might have told her worried parents, once the storm cleared and she returned home. “They were giant jellyfish, but too big to support themselves. They couldn’t last. I knew that.” The doctors and scientists now had the needed answer — The disaster soon ended on its own — so quickly raced out of the room to fly home and spread the good news. They didn’t hear her say, “Right after lunch, let’s grab our sleds and go to our favorite slope before it gets too warm and sticks. That will ruin everything.”