When it comes to beginnings, as far as childhood and upbringing go, you couldn’t get more clean-cut-standard-middle-class-southern-white-American-dreamy than this one. The jock and the cheerleader were high school sweethearts, were married at a young age and had 2 children, a boy and a girl, two and a half years apart from each other in age. They were a church-going family. Both parents were hard working folks who aimed to give their nuclear family a solid foundation to build upon. They lived a comfortable life, but the children weren’t spoiled by any means. The parents expected excellence from their children’s performances in school and in extracurricular activities - not because the parents needed to prove anything, but because they knew their children were capable of it and why wouldn’t you give everything that you set your mind to 100%? At least this was the way it seemed to the eldest child, the son, upon reflection years later.

Thomas would later recall, with his sister, that their childhood seemed “charmed.” Sure, there was sibling rivalry, arguments, uncomfortable silences, and the death of a grandparent in those early years to name a few examples of “imperfection,” but there were no broken bones, no hospital trips, no community upheavals that rocked their world and altered day to day life by much.

It was therefore, with overwhelming shock, discomfort, and a decent helping of consternation that in Thomas’s eighteenth year of life as a senior in high school looking towards his future, the veil was lifted and the real world came flooding in.

If you spoke to Thomas about life before this, he would tell you that the only signs of the erosion of innocence within his life came from his quiet, internal struggle with homosexuality...another story for another time. To Thomas, those urgings could be controlled, quelled, or kept in the dark...at least for the time being. It was when things beyond his control crept into his life that he felt innocence was truly being forced out of his life.

The first sign began around the holidays. It was merely weeks before the winter holiday break, and as was his body’s tendency when nearing the end of a marathon of activity, sleep-deprivation, and general over exertion, Thomas started getting a tickle in his throat that was a sure-fire sign of strep or tonsillitis or some other similar ailment. No, no, no, this can’t be happening, he thought. He had a solo in the school choir’s Christmas concert and he needed his voice to be there.

His mom took him to the doctor a few days later, you know, once the illness was clearly getting worse and not better. His mom always did that. She always insisted, “Let’s be sure you can’t fight it yourself. Let’s be sure you actually need medicine or a doctor’s prognosis and medicine before we seek it. You’re tough.”

With only an examination in the bag, the doctor declared that, based on symptoms and what is typical in the realm of disease within those symptoms, Thomas probably had strep throat. It could be tonsillitis, but we would treat it as strep with antibiotics to knock it out...just in case. With amoxicillin in hand, Thomas left the doctor to live his life. 

A couple of days after beginning the amoxicillin, he developed a rash that really couldn’t be explained other than from his taking of amoxicillin. After all, that’s the only thing that had changed in the past couple of days. The weird thing was that Thomas had never had an allergy to penicillin-based drugs before, so he thought this odd. Perhaps the doctor did, too, but he didn’t think enough about it to do any further inquiry - just to change the type of antibiotic.

Thomas got better and plowed through the rest of the semester, sang on mostly healthy vocal cords, and had a fun and healthy rest of the holidays. All seemed well…

In the spring semester, Thomas started noticing random bruises on his body. There was never an explanation as to where they originated from. It was possible he banged his knee on a table or hit his arm on a door frame or something of a similar nature, but he couldn’t really tell you why as he’d never been prone to bruising before. But the bruises were prevalent enough that his mom began to notice and asked a couple of times why he was banged up. He just shrugged them off - after all, he felt fine.

The only other concerning sign that something might not be quite right came with the summer and Thomas’s desire to get into better shape. As a lifeguard at a local pool, Thomas would stay early or leave late in order to work out in the gym attached to the pool’s clubhouse. It was on his runs on the treadmill or elliptical, particularly the sprints, that he noticed something odd happening. When he would get his heart rate up, he’d taste the metal of his own blood in his mouth. Looking in the mirror, he realized his gums were bleeding. Again, this seemed very strange...he felt healthy and fine and he took good care of his teeth. What could be causing this sensation? Surely not some sort of degenerative gum disease?

It was through his physical for college and the blood work that was needed that things started coming to light. He had gone to get the physical on a Thursday or a Friday and on the following Saturday, after having spent the morning out with his family, he came home to a message on the answering machine saying that he needed to come back in for some follow up blood work but that he and his parents should call back immediately.

With a slightly elevated blood pressure, and rising anxiety, the family called back to learn that when they got the test results, Thomas’s platelet count was desperately low. The doctor explained that 150,000 to 450,000 platelets per microliter of blood was normal. Thomas’s registered 11,000...less than 10% of the acceptable low. Perhaps it was a fluke of the machine, but to be sure, the doctor wanted to see him on Monday to re-draw and do another test. It was at this time, that a hematologist/oncologist was introduced into the mix at the hospital. After going in and doing another Complete Blood Count and learning that his platelets were even LOWER (9,000), Thomas was put on a healthy dose of steroids, which can help in these situations, as well as having about 7 or 8 other vials of blood drawn to test for everything that could be causing this abnormality; Lupus, Leukemia, HIV, and ironically enough, the “kissing disease” mono(nucleosis) were all on the table as viable options as well as several others. In the end, the only thing that could correlate and explain what was going on with the low platelet counts were antibodies for mono.

What did it mean? Well, Thomas learned that sometimes when a person contracts mono (which incidentally can cause a rash reaction to penicillins!) if that person doesn’t rest properly or take care of themselves for a couple of weeks while they are enduring the virus, their body can have an adverse reaction by means of spleen enlargement. This is precisely what happened to Thomas, and this spleen enlargement triggered an auto-immune response in the body called Immuno Thrombocytopenic Purpura or ITP for short. When this happens, the body sees platelets as foreign objects in the body that must be destroyed, and that’s exactly what was happening to Thomas. His body was destroying platelets quicker than it could make them.

As the saga of treatment and putting off a splenectomy continued through the summer, another type of innocence was coming to a close in Thomas’s life. It’s that child’s innocence that projects on the adults around them, who in the child’s inexperienced eyes (and with help from good moral behavior on the adult’s part in front of the child) see adults as nearly perfect and infallible, having all of life's answers. All of the adults in Thomas’s life that were part of his family’s close circle of friends were jolly, kind, married (happily), fun to be around, and had children themselves that happened to be some of Thomas’s best friends. Through his eyes, they were an extension of his parents. I’m sure to his parents, they seemed an extension of them as well. After all, they did mutually choose each other as friends.

What Thomas learned that summer is that things aren’t always as they seem in the world of adults. Oftentimes adults put on a facade to some extent, even to their friends. This author would argue that is especially the case within faith communities where moral uprightness and righteousness is sought by its members and the more socially unacceptable thoughts and actions are shunned, seen as “sinful,” or looked upon with some degree of shame.

It was an early evening in late July or early August and Thomas’s mom called him while he was lifeguarding and said she was coming early with dinner and that they were going over to the Carr’s house. She sounded a little tense and perhaps emotional on the phone as she followed that statement up saying that Alice, the mom of Thomas’s best friend, called and said that her husband, John, had done a very bad thing and that she needed some support as she’d just kicked him out of the house.

As an adult, in the thick of the situation, I can imagine that even though the situation itself might not be shocking, Alice’s emotional buildup and release through her unpleasant revelations would still be very horrible. As a teenager who knew nothing of the situation, Thomas was stunned. What could have happened to them? What had John done? How were the boys? It wasn’t until a few hours later, as the sun was extinguished with the coming of night that Thomas’s innocence was also doused in the full realization of the truth. John Carr had been cheating on his wife, Alice for the better part of the last 6 years. Thomas’s parents knew there had been some unrest in their marriage a few years ago, but obviously didn’t think to burden Thomas or his younger sister with this knowledge. 

Apparently, the couple decided to make things work for their sons and to gloss over some of their marital tribulations. That is, until the woman John was sleeping with got fed up with keeping it a secret. She wanted John to leave Alice and be with her. In her impatience and frustration of being “the OTHER woman” and John not being forthcoming with his wife, she took matters into her own hands. She sent Alice every email that the two secret lovers had written to each other over the past several years, providing evidence of all of the times John had gone on “solo” trips that turned out to be not-so-solo trips.

Thomas couldn’t imagine the deluge of fury, hurt, and grief that Alice must have felt, opening email after email and reading about the trysts that were being planned, seeing her husband’s betrayal in black and white. Or what the sons must have felt having their trust in their parents shattered like that. Thomas, and his parents, both felt a little betrayed themselves. The family they thought they knew was not so known to them anymore. Thomas still knew and loved the boys that he had spent all of his childhood with and as far as humans go, Alice and John are decent humans. They just made some mistakes, as we all do.

The charm of childhood was wearing off. That feeling that everything was going to be alright, that everything was as it seemed was waning. Thomas was no longer sure that “good” meant what he thought it meant. Despite all of the good fortune his childhood had afforded him, he was learning that life wasn’t always going to feel this easy. Life wouldn’t be laid out beautifully in a spread before him to consume at his leisure. He continued to learn this as he navigated his way through his first semester of college, dealing with the impending splenectomy that took him out of school for a week, and then, later in the semester, a 2nd degree ankle sprain that kept him from auditioning properly for the spring musical, 42nd street.

It wasn’t until years later, after the eventual splenectomy, after Alice and John had found happiness in other partners and their boys grew up and started living their own adult lives, that Thomas started really seeing the world as it was and championing vulnerability and authenticity in his own life - not to mention, seeking a healthy dose of silver-linings. The faith foundation that had been so carefully built for him by his parents and church community, their ideas of right from wrong, what “sin” is, and what REALLY matters to God, if there even is one that can be defined by and confined within a single religion, all had to be dismantled by Thomas, carefully examined, and rebuilt or refitted in a way that better explained the world, history, the present and what real “goodness” is.

Everyone has their own pace at stepping into the full reality of the world and leaving childhood behind. I could argue that part of nostalgia is a melancholic mourning for that lost innocence of a youth when life seemed easier. That is why I believe it to be one of the more dangerous emotional and mental states that humans can live in. If unchecked, we stop living in and embracing the present and we start longing for a romanticized past that feels easier and simpler...even though, if we examined our pasts with an accurate lens, we’d still see plenty of reasons worth abandoning it and living in the reality of now. But this is adjacent to the point, not the point itself.

The point, at least in Thomas’s case, is that innocence is more an illusion - like Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy. It is also that society and “nurture” play a huge role in the way that we filter and view the world around us. If someone had presented a healthier and more well-rounded version of reality that showed the light and the dark of the world with all of the nuances of gray that fall in between, Thomas would have realized that the gray is what makes up 99% of the world. The pure white and the pure black end of the spectrum are merely bookending points. Thomas eventually came to this understanding, but it was a conscious effort on his part to do so. And the effort continues to this day.

Also worth noting is that, through this ongoing journey of life, Thomas has learned that the meaning that humans tend to apply to certain circumstances in their lives as either Karmic or as a praise/punishment response from The Divine because of other prior circumstances and behaviors we humans have displayed is not nearly as important (or accurate an assessment) as the subsequent action or inaction taken in response and reflection to those circumstances. THAT’S where the true meaning comes from. The meaning to our lives and the circumstances therein comes because WE give them meaning. Also, hindsight is 20/20. Try not to judge in the moment. Follow your intuition. Make the world a better place because you were there.