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Courage To Walk

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An impatient reader, I normally scan paragraphs and hunt for the meat of a chapter. Not so with Courage to Walk. I found myself reading every word, slowly savoring each like a flavorful bite. I didn't want to miss one. It was effortless to glide along as the narrative shifted back and forth from poetry to the Waxler family's challenging experience. Bob's skill in telling his story supported by the perfect lines of prose that reflected his emotions added another satisfying level for me.

One cannot help but joyfully celebrate Jeremy's progress and recovery. For their faith, optimism and unyielding efforts in embracing Jeremy in every way possible as he overcome his devastating illness, my utmost respect and adulation go to Bob and Linda. After vicariously experiencing their ordeal, each of us should feel compelled to hug our loved ones a little longer and savor the knowledge that they are safe and well.

In THE COURAGE TO WALK, Bob Waxler writes about his younger son's battle against a potentially paralyzing disease. He describes the harrowing details of Jeremy's journey, beginning with its initial onset, through many doctors' appointments, surgeries, and physical therapy sessions. The book is beautifully written and shares with the reader a very personal glimpse of a family's strength and love.

Dr. Robert Waxler takes us on a second journey in which one of his sons is facing an almost impossible battle against the odds. In his first book, Losing Jonathan, he shares the agony of the hourly roller coaster emotions he and Linda faced as they fought to keep Jonathan alive and focused on beating his heroin addiction, a battle that he eventually lost a year later. Bob and Linda's willingness to open their hearts and share their pain, courage and loss helped all of us who are parents. One would have hoped that they would never have to face such an agonizing experience again. Maybe lesser people would have crumbled when the second event smacked them in the face and challenged them to dig even deeper than they thought they could. Not Bob and Linda.

They took Jeremy to the hospital believing his inability to walk was nothing more than a simple back problem. Maybe a pinched nerve or muscle spasm. Then the doctors told them Jeremy needed immediate emergency surgery or he might die that night. There was no time for second opinions or alternatives. In Antonio Portia's translated aphorisms, "Voices," he says, " A new pain enters and the old pains of the household receive it with their silence, not with their death." For the second time, Bob and Linda faced the terrifying prospect of losing a son. Could they survive the pain of losing Jeremy on top of the pain of having lost Jonathan? For them, giving up was not an option.

"Courage to Walk" illustrates how the infinite love and support of family and the courage of both parents and child can make a difference. It was not that they had done more for Jeremy than they's done to save Jonathan that resulted in Jeremy's survival . Rather, it was Jeremy's courage and willingness to fight his battle with every ounce of his strength that brought him back from the brink of death to a man who could stand tall and walk with pride. In one aphorism in "Voices," Portia states, "I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received." Bob Waxler's "Courage to Walk", has given us a treasure chest of opportunities to learn invaluable lessons about hope, faith and courage in this triumphant story.

Courage to Walk, by Bob Waxler

Charles Darwin said there is nothing more terrible to endure than the loss of a son or daughter on the brink of adulthood, which he knew by assessing the cumulative biological investment that our species makes in its offspring, and also by his own, permanent, never-evaporating lifelong grief, from the loss of his daughter Annie. A close runner-up in this grim tally of the threads of gene-deep agony must be seeing a thriving young adult child suddenly, inexplicably brought down by paralysis and great pain.

Bob Waxler, a New England English professor, is comfortable but not coddled. He navigates the family van both by "ponds" and McDonald's. Him the lightening struck twice, in his first (lost), and then his second (sudden spinal paralysis) son. But Professor Waxler doesn't escape into literature; he digs right into the icky details of life, with literature lying like a light garment over the whole story. The doctor says of his second son that "the bladder follows the feet" in any recovery from spinal paralysis. Bob remembers Thoreau's politely wafted remark about the glory of a man's freedom to take a pee on a walk in the woods.

A close reader of William Blake, Bob studies the hospital sheet that lightly drapes his stricken son. I happen to know that it revealed to him what Blake would call the lineaments and sinews of his son's strength, and simultaneously presented to him a shrouded landscape of dismay. It is kind of fun for me that Bob doesn't need to mention that in the book. Courage laces on the literature lightly, with a sure, easy hand.

Hailing from the mostly-agreeably-squabbling, diverse tribe that makes up the American North East urban corridor, Bob offers Jewish-team affiliation, and goes on to note, pro forma, which doctor on staff looks Jewish. But his chosen ones are a Chinese-surnamed doctor, and surgeon with a run-of-the-mill New England name, with no further comment as to faith or ethnicity. It is time to get on with the serious work: can we improve his son's 33% chances of getting off easier than Christopher Reeve?

As a Blake reader, Bob knows the "Great Interpreter's" central view that religion is "frozen poetry." Rather than make him cynical, this view seems to blur his spiritual side into humor, or at least self-deprecating pragmatism: he gets his hands on some Fatima holy water, wonders about Chinese traditional healing, recalls some words of Jesus, and nuttily considers a healing commune in Brazil run by someone called John of God. Waxler's faith seems to boil down to family and literature: he loves his "beautiful wife Linda" as he ponders her contrary modes of cheerleader optimism and dead-stop balk, in the face of that signal grief, parental grief. As for literature, the armor of the lifelong reader, for Bob it is no shell nor escape, so much as a light garment that organizes and reveals for him the "minute particulars" of real life beneath.

Here is an English Major who has been true to his lights, "kept the vision in a time of trouble." Waxler has his path: he says the "unnarrated life" is the one that is not worth living. Parents whose very DNA has reverberated with such grief--it doubles down of course with the thought that the young one's suffering is worse than one's own, at second hand, and we would swap--will recognize the deep threads of love in it. Those of us who have been reasonably lucky with the kids so far will recognize threads in it too, because here is the fear every parent puts on, like an old familiar coat, and wears out the door every morning.

I finished the book last night. You have shared so much of
> your experience and yourself I felt at times I was there with you . It is
> a fearsome place to be , assaulted by illness, fear and lacking the
> understanding that one needs to make decisions that one so desperately
> want to be right. I really hate those moments in a crisis like that . I
> always feel so helpless. Your story shows clearly that my story even ,in
> lessor crisis, and my reactions are not so different. I could never
> have gained that perspective without your willingness to open yourself up
> to your readers, displaying your full self the good, the heroic and the
> fearful. Thanks for that. My fearfulness embarrasses me, and I usually
> try to cover it over. I'm beginning to see that I don't need to do that.
> Without going through the whole book picking out pieces, I need to tell
> you that the images of the med. tech stuff in the kitchen, next to the
> toaster, or the orange juice, the juxtaposition of these things was jolting and
> stunning. I think it was the bringing together these two worlds that
> says a lot about the journey you guys were on for so long. And thanks
> for reminding me what real love is all about. Thanks also for showing
> your wife and son's remarkable courage in the face of such adversity
> ,what an example for the rest of us. Congratulations on the book.

Jeremy's perilous journey back to good health, as told by his father with loving precision, is gracefully enriched with literary allusions and philosophical insight into the human condition. This inspiring tale is a mixture of loss, despair, hope, optimism, gratitude, and eventual redemption by a family unwilling to capitulate to life's exigencies.

Robert Waxler's Courage to Walk is a compelling book about a family's courage in confronting their son's dangerous disease, an infection that threatens to deprive the young Jeremy of his ability to walk. His father Robert, the author, beckons readers into the sanctity of the human spirit as his son undergoes a horrendous operation and fights to regain use of his body.

Waxler surveys the early charmed life of his son: Jeremy, the winner of the citywide spelling bee; Jeremy, the proud young prosecutor working out a plea bargain with the rapper Busta Rhymes' defense lawyers; Jeremy and his cohort of young professionals out on the town in Boston; and then the desperately ill Jeremy, calling for his parents' help in his sudden agonizing and rapidly advancing paralysis.

Like the wounded Jeremy, Waxler himself struggles to find courage in confronting fears of losing a son. Like Jeremy's mother Linda, the reader becomes a cheerleader, offering hope for Jeremy's recovery. Like Jeremy himself, the reader witnesses a miracle.

Professor Waxler's literary references dot the pages of his memoir, almost comprising a course in the meaning of life. Waxler calls on the wisdom of John Bunyan, John Milton, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson among others, providing readers with help in tempering despair.

Courage to Walk testifies to Jeremy's limitless positive powers of healing. The book is a further testament to Robert Waxler's endurance. Readers participate in Waxler's harrowing journey, sharing his strength and wisdom.

As an artist uses paints, brushes and canvas to capture his impressions of the world around him, Waxler uses the tools of his craft to paint a powerfully stirring story of family love, parental dedication and enduring hope.
His words are like strokes, his thoughts like the colors he boldly scatters across his canvass. Strong and beautiful in their own right, up close one can easily see their abstractions, the masterful use of wording, the metaphor, the poetry, but take a few steps back, as you would view an immpressionist painting, and you will be moved by the atmosphere of tragedy juxtaposed against the light of triumph.

Robert Waxler has written an unusual and beautiful book. In Courage to Walk Waxler chronicles his son Jeremy's battle to overcome a rare infection that attacks his spine. As Jeremy struggles against long odds to recover, Waxler and his wife Linda mightily do all they can to save their son's life. This book is a study in courage and hope, a love story of a father for his son, an intimate look at a family in turmoil struggling to make it through, and more. Often it reads like a suspense novel, the reader turning page after page in anticipation wondering if Jeremy will survive his ordeal. These qualities rivet the reader to the page, but Waxler's ruminations on the layers just under the skin of daily life capture the reader's soul.

When Jeremy Waxler enters the hospital with a potentially deadly virus, doctors give him small hope to walk again, or even survive. Over the course of weeks and months, summoning the will of heroes Jeremy beats back the damaging effects of the virus crushing his spine and deadening his bladder. One of his doctors calls Jeremy's ongoing recovery "a miracle." It is. Waxler shows the reader his son's will to survive finally proves Jeremy his own miracle worker.

As much as he fixes the narrative on Jeremy's courageous fight, Waxler struggles to comprehend the first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths--"life is suffering." Waxler, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, tells us he often uses the literature he teaches to make sense of the world. Here he employs poems, stories, novels, pop songs, and Biblical references, among other literary forms, to explore and illuminate that place "beyond the border" where afflictions so often deposit us and disrupt our hopes, dreams, and expectations. Waxler reminds us life never proceeds unstained by pain, suffering, and sorrow. Afflictions of all kinds and of varying degrees constantly beleaguer us. Throughout much of this book, Waxler dwells in this place "beyond the border" and wrestles to understand its purpose in our lives.

Courage to Walk is a complex and unusual book, one that can take its place alongside works like Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Waxler's rich and multi-layered language pulls us along through a suspenseful narrative. At the same time, it stops us in our tracks as Waxler invites the reader to ponder something more than this disease that plagues his son. He pushes us to examine the meaning of life's unexpected disruptions, and how we should recognize and deal with these since they account for a good part of our lives and the lives of those around us. In this book Waxler explores the many levels of existence that intertwine to make up this strange concoction of experiences we call life. His book stands as a courageous attempt to answer the questions we all ask from time to time: "What is life?" and "what does it mean to be alive?"

Waxler's journey recalls a similar one Coleridge's ancient mariner experiences. As we read about Jeremy's brave effort to survive and his parents' actions to save him, Robert Waxler exposes the reader to levels of life he may not ordinarily visit. And Waxler, too, like the star-crossed mariner at the end of the day,finds himself "a wiser man." Ultimately, he offers a recognition for our suffering: "The rupturing of the body and battering of the heart, the tearing of the soul apart...can lead to transfiguration." Even as Waxler surfaces to this revelation, he challenges the reader to find his own answers to life's tough and often unthinkable circumstances and questions. For such a small book, Courage to Walk packs a wallop.

When Robert Waxler found his son on the floor, the race was on to find the cause of Jeremy's paralysis. When answers were slow in coming, the emphasis shifted to the emotional journey of a father concerned about his son. His emotions were complicated by the fact that Robert Waxler had lost his eldest son 12 years earlier to a heroin overdose, a tragedy Waxler wrote about in his earlier memoir, "Losing Jonathan" Losing Jonathan co-written with wife Linda. In both memoirs, he struggles with difficult emotions, and shares his process with readers, using memoirs for their most intimate purpose, to lead us through the author's inner world.

The story is driven by two forces: Jeremy's need to reclaim his health and the author's need to find enough wisdom to maintain his own dignity while his son is in danger. Robert Waxler is a professor at University of Massachusetts, so naturally his memoir greets readers at the gates of his ivory tower, but instead of taking us inside the academy, he takes us on a tour of his private life, as he tries to protect the successful, athletic lawyer from the disaster that seems to be knocking on the family door. His love inlaid with panic, Waxler turned for support to his wife, brother, his community, his literature, and his Jewish religion.

His attempt to find words to describe and understand all these difficult emotions reminds me of a quote from Frank McCourt's memoir "Tis." McCourt started to cry as his plane approached Ireland. "It's strange to think there are no words for what I'm feeling, unless they are in Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson or Dostoevsky and I didn't notice them." Waxler seems to be on a lifelong search to find them as well, and his memoir takes us along on this journey.

Both of Waxler's memoirs are compelling, authentic, and revealing, and helped me learn more about what it felt like to be an intellectual, a father, and a man looking for strength to help him through his darkest hours.

Disclaimer: While our shared names contributed to my curiosity about Robert Waxler's family, we are not related.