To James

Hey kiddo,

This is my second attempt at writing this letter. I know it has been taking me a bit to respond, but I figure that it’s best I take my time. It will end up better that way—if I go another pass at it.

I got your last letter; I hope you haven’t been worrying that I didn’t.

I was always scared too, you know.

Not in an anxious way neither, more in a fear of death sort of way. The type of scared where you’re always preparing for the next moment to be your last. I want to say there is no shame in it, because really there isn’t.

But when I was a kid, I sure felt ashamed of being scared.

Now is the time, however, to be scared. Nothing gives me more of that fear of death than forcing myself to write honestly and openly, which you need me to do.

I always really want to say the right thing, kiddo—that’s why it takes me so long to ever say anything in the first place. It’s too painful to think there is a “right” thing to say, you’ll find. I don’t know how to make you feel better.

So, instead I’ll just tell you a story, and we’ll find each other along the way:

When I was in the hospital, they asked me if I wanted to cut my leg off. I was 11 years old, and my orthopedic surgeon came into the room one day, slammed his hand down on my blackened husk of a foot and asked me: do you want to cut it off, or do you want to keep trying to hold on to it?

It was a legitimate question. Technically speaking there were still treatments to explore. For months, I had been told there was still hope that live tissue was somewhere in there. Tear away the dead flesh and pray there was some new underneath—Reconstruction is what they called it. I never quite understood the “construction” piece. They tore me apart faster than the rot did.

My pinky toe had been the first to go. A small, black creep along the very most outer edge of my left foot. How manageable it had seemed at first; how inconsequential was a toe, when compared to a life?

Those were hopeful days.

It would’ve been nice to have been awake for them.

When I came to from my coma, the next three toes were black as coal, and half my foot was cracked and oozing, the rot inching its way to the big one. It was dead. I knew that as soon as I woke up. I couldn’t remember a thing—forgot my name, even. Forgot the day it happened, forgot my classmates and what I had been doing: before I got here.

Try as I might, though, there was no way to forget the numbness.

It was gone.

“Cut it off.”

I remember the doctor started. He recoiled as if he had been struck. Who could blame him, really? It’s not like I was a particularly talkative child to begin with—just like you, you know? And quiet children become silent ones, in the hospital. So, the ease of my response came as a surprise to us all. The strength of it, almost offensive.

Surprised me too. I remember saying it, and just feeling scared. That fear of death scared. That oh no what have I done scared.

You see, this is where the real story begins kiddo. If, at any time, I have told it before, I have stopped it right around here. I skip to the end—when we’ve gotten through the whole shebang and the leg is finally off.

I have never tried to tell it in full.

I have always been too ashamed.

With my response, the surgery was promptly scheduled for the next week. T-minus 8 days ‘till amputation, so to speak.

What a strange experience it is, as a child, to be asked to march towards your death.

I have never felt so removed from myself. The whole week I was wined, dined, and 69’ed like never before. Friends I hadn’t seen in weeks showed up; family I hadn’t seen in years came to say goodbye to the ‘ole two-legged Lucas. The nurses were nicer, the doctors somehow managed to not be assholes, and my mother never once asked me: how are you feeling?

Or maybe I just don’t remember answering. So much of the hospital is a blur. This week, however, is the blankest space in my brain. They were, without a doubt, the worst days of my life. There is no worse feeling in the world then to be treated as brave, when you are in fact scared. I remember the look in their eyes:

They thought my will indestructible.

So, I sought to destroy it.

There was nothing I wanted more than to not exist. Well, what I wanted most was my leg back, but with that option being biologically impossible—I favored a policy of mutually assured non-existence with the Dying Leg delegation.

Those memories are missing from my mind because I actively annihilated any that formed. I went back every night and mined each and every second dry of its emotion.

I was under the impression that I could somehow make the amputation unimportant. I asked myself, “If no one remembers, did it even really happen?” And when “no one” else seemed interested in finding out the answer to that question—when no one seemed nearly as good at forgetting, I made a natural conclusion and a selfless sacrifice:

I tried out being “no one.”

I was scared, you see. There was really no choice except the one I made; there was no way to step off the path, either.

I didn’t want time to move. I wished I had never told that surgeon of mine anything at all. I wished I didn’t make choices, in the first place.

Wished I didn’t know which way I preferred going—which fork I was taking before I came upon it.

There was no avoiding the surgery, but I sure tried.

All I succeeded in doing was suffocating myself. Disappearing—somehow—from within my own mind. My own thoughts reduced to panicked, gasping breaths that I negligently ignored.

I almost died. Not even—

Almost let myself simply fade into oblivion.

My brilliant scheme came crashing down, the date of the surgery. It is the one day I can tell you about, because it is the one day that I made sure to never forget.

I had been planning to disappear for quite some time, so when it became obvious that there would be no grand caper out of the hospital—when the amputation became real, the feasibility of my non-existence grew apparently unobtainable.

As they rolled me down to the OR, a voice raged in my head.

It was the scared little kid I had been working to “take care of” (nudge, nudge) all week.

What he said, specifically, is not really of much interest. What was important was that I could hear my own thoughts again.

I snapped.

Up until this point, I had been a placid, agreeable patient. I had gone along with every procedure; answered every question; reaffirmed my commitment to the amputation.

I could not hold him in any longer.

The rage was all consuming. I screamed. I kicked and punched any stray body I could find. Every obscenity known to mankind poured from my mouth.

Surgeons and aides alike rushed to tie me to the cot, but I flailed so violently and senselessly that they could not pin any of my limbs down.

For the first time in months, I moved in tandem with the dead leg.

Me and the corpse shook off every soothing hand.

Scratched at and chased away all the needles meant to sedate me.

I had one thought echoing through me, that I fought tirelessly to fulfill.

It was: SURVIVE.

After a brief skirmish, the surgery was rescheduled for the same time next week. I remember being ashamed. I remember regretting what I had ended up having to do.

Again, you know. I was scared… again. And all because I’d let myself be brave.

I really needed to stop that surgery, kiddo. I really needed at least one memory from the hospital in which I could see myself.

I had no power there. I was stuck and prodded indiscriminately. My body, the property of the men tasked to save me. And save me they did. So, I did not even have the power to complain about how they used me.

That outburst was a long time coming. You don’t drop dead in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens without some emotional fallout, yet—somehow, I had avoided it until now. But I had always felt that rabid incredulity at the edge of my consciousness. The fear that none if it got to be mine. So much of it was their pain too, you know?

I didn’t even have any memories of the heart attack or subsequent surgeries. I had been asleep—knocked out by a cocktail of drugs—for the entirety of my near-death experience.

All I knew came from the stories they told me. Even my pain had to be granted to me. What I learned came at another person’s pace. My life saved by another’s hand.

Not that final week though.

No, we moved at my pace.

I saved my own life.

The second amputation was not nearly as difficult. Almost no one came to visit; I played UNO peacefully most nights with some of the other patients in the ward.

I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. My dad got me takeout from the Italian restaurant across the street. My mother and I would get tea every day at the shop in the market downstairs.

And, most importantly, I spent those last few days before talking about how scared I was. I told them all about the shame.

“I don’t know how to be brave,” I said.

But I did.

When the anesthesiologist came into my room,—the morning of the amputation—he asked me if I was ready.

I was scared.

“Yes.”

I remember myself recoiling, as if struck.

“Aren’t you scared, kiddo?” and it’s my mother asking the question, but it feels just like the voice raging in my mind.

I nod my head.

“You have to be scared, don’t you?” I say it timidly, as if the implication of confidence is almost too offensive to make up for. “To be brave, you have to be scared.”

Then I let them cut my leg off.

You see, kiddo, there ain’t nothing wrong with getting a little scared. Hell, sometimes we even need to act scared for a looong time before we can get over it.

But remember this: you’re only ever scared because you need to be.

And when the times comes for you to be ready:

You’ll be brave, as much as you are scared.

Until next time kiddo.

Yours always,

LUCAS JACKSON PETERKA

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