When I was twenty-two and working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, I would spend twenty-four hours on call once or twice a week. This meant that I’d stay in the hospital with two beepers. One beeper went off whenever someone asked for a chaplain. The other buzzed when a serious trauma case arrived at the hospital. One of my last nights on call, toward the end of my six-month chaplaincy, I was asleep in the pastoral care office when the trauma pager sent me down to the Emergency Department. A three-year-old child was being wheeled in. He’d suffered severe burns.

I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to talk about the suffering of others without exploiting that suffering, whether you can write about pain without glorifying or ennobling or degrading it. Teju Cole once said that “a photograph can’t help taming what it shows,” and I worry the same might be true of language. Stories have to make sense, and nothing at the hospital made any sense to me at all, which is one of the reasons I’ve rarely written about my time there directly. I don’t know the proper way through this morass, and I never have, but in telling this story, I’ve chosen to obscure and alter certain details. The important thing is that despite the severity of his injury, the child was conscious, and in terrible pain.

Although I’d been around the Emergency Department for months, and seen all manner of suffering and death, I’d never seen the trauma team so visibly upset. The anguish was overwhelming—the smell of the burns, the piercing screams that accompanied this little boy’s every exhalation. Someone shouted, “CHAPLAIN! THE SCISSORS BEHIND YOU!” and in a daze I brought them the scissors. Someone shouted, “CHAPLAIN! THE PARENTS!” And I realized that next to me the little boy’s parents were screaming, trying to get at their kid, but the doctors and paramedics and nurses needed enough space to work, so I had to ask the parents to step back.

Next thing I knew I was in the windowless family room in the Emergency Department, the room where they put you on the worst night of your life. It was quiet except for the crying of the couple across from me. They sat on opposite sides of the couch, elbows on knees.

During my training they told me that half of marriages end within a couple years of losing a child. Weakly, I asked the parents if they wanted to pray. The woman shook her head no. The doctor came in and said that the kid was in critical condition. The parents only had one question, and it was one the doctor couldn’t answer. “We’ll do everything we can,” she said, “but your son may not survive.” Both the parents collapsed, not against each other, but into themselves.

* * *

We are able to navigate the world knowing these things happen. My chaplaincy supervisor once told me, “Children have always died. It is natural.” That may be true, but I can’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it sitting in the windowless family room, and I can’t accept it now, as a father myself.

* * *

When the kid finally went upstairs to the ICU and his parents followed, I walked to the break room to get a cup of coffee, and the doctor was in there, her face hovering over a trash can that she’d been vomiting into. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You did good with them. Thanks for being kind to them. I think it helped.” She dry heaved for a while and then said, “That kid’s gonna die and I know his last words. I know the last thing he’ll ever say.” I didn’t ask her to tell me what it was, and she didn’t volunteer.

A week later, I finished the chaplaincy program, and decided not to go to divinity school. I told everyone it was because I didn’t want to learn Greek, which was true, but it was also true that I couldn’t cope with the memory of this kid. I still can’t cope with it. I thought about him every day. I prayed for him every day, even after I stopped praying about anything else. Every night, still, I say his name and ask God for mercy. Whether I believe in God isn’t really relevant. I do believe, however tenuously, in mercy.

As an inveterate googler, I knew I could have just looked up his name, but I was too scared. To google would have been to know, one way or another. I’m reminded of that great line from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.”

* * *

The months of not knowing became years, then more than a decade. And then one morning not long ago, I typed the kid’s name into the search bar. It’s an unusual name, easy pickings for Google. I hit enter. The first link was to a Facebook. I clicked over, and there he was. Eighteen years old, a decade and a half removed from the one night we spent together.

He is alive.

He is growing up, finding his way in the world, documenting a life that is more public than he probably realizes. But how can I not be grateful for knowing, even if the only way to know is to lose our autonomy over our so-called selves? He is alive. He likes John Deere tractors, and is a member of the Future Farmers of America, and he is alive.

Scrolling through his friends, I find his parents’ profiles, and discover that they are still married. He is alive. He likes terrible, overly manufactured country music. He is alive. He calls his girlfriend his bae. Alive. Alive. Alive.

It could’ve gone the other way, of course. But it didn’t. And so I can’t help but give the practice of googling strangers four stars.

INDIANAPOLIS

INDIANAPOLIS IS THE SIXTEENTH LARGEST CITY in the U.S. by both population and land area. It is the capital of Indiana, and I guess it is now my hometown. Sarah and I moved to Indianapolis in the summer of 2007. We drove a U-Haul with all our worldly belongings from the corner of 88th and Columbus in New York City to the corner of 86th and Ditch in Indianapolis, an extremely stressful sixteen-hour drive. When we finally arrived in Indianapolis, we unpacked our stuff and slept on an air mattress in our new home, the first place we’d ever owned. We were in our late twenties, and we’d bought this house a few weeks earlier after spending maybe a half hour inside of it. The house had three bedrooms, two and a half baths, and a half-finished basement. Our mortgage payment was a third of what our New York rent had been.

I couldn’t get over how quiet and dark the house was that first night. I kept telling Sarah that someone could be standing right outside our bedroom window and we wouldn’t even know, and then Sarah would say, “Well, but probably not.” And I’m just not the sort of person who is effectively comforted by probablys, so several times through the night I got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window, expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness.

The next morning, I insisted that we buy some curtains, but first we had to drop off the moving van. At the U-Haul return place, a guy handed us some paperwork to fill out, and asked us where we’d driven in from. Sarah explained that we had moved from New York for her job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the guy said he’d been to the museum once as a kid, and then Sarah said, “So, what do you think of Indianapolis?”

And then the guy standing behind the counter at the U-Haul place paused for a moment before saying, “Well, you gotta live somewhere.”

Indianapolis has tried on a lot of mottoes and catchphrases over the years. Indianapolis is “Raising the Game.” “You put the ‘I’ in Indy.” “Crossroads of America.” But I’d propose a different motto: “Indianapolis: You gotta live somewhere.”

* * *

There’s no getting around Indianapolis’s many imperfections. We are situated on the White River, a non-navigable waterway, which is endlessly resonant as metaphor but problematic as geography. Furthermore, the river is filthy, because our aging water treatment system frequently overflows and dumps raw sewage directly into it. The city sprawls in every direction—endless mini-malls and parking lots and nondescript office buildings. We don’t invest enough in the arts or public transportation. One of our major thoroughfares is named Ditch Road, for God’s sakes. Ditch Road. We could name it anything—Kurt Vonnegut Drive, Madam C. J. Walker Way, Roady McRoadface—but we don’t. We accept Ditch.