Bargaining

This is a tricky one. Who do you bargain with when you have a disabled child?

It's not like I can go to the doctors and offer them something to make my son better. Though of course I looked into that possibility.

I looked into any potential studies and experimental treatments. I was going to use all of our resources into getting Dylan help that the general public was not aware of or that they did not have access too. If I had to fly him to Switzerland or South Korea, I did not care. I was going to find the miracle cure for him out there somewhere.

That lasted for about a week.

I soon realized that no matter what contacts I had, no matter my ability to negotiate something for my son, no matter what bargains I could make, it would not make a difference. This was not a disease that could be cured. Every single cell in Dylan's body was damaged. There was no pill or shot or elixir or surgery that could fix him.

Modern science could do nothing for Dylan. He would need a miracle.

Like many other people, I turned to prayer.

I have never been a very religious person. Though my great-grandfather was an orthodox cantor in a shul in Odessa, Ukraine, 60 years of communism had eliminated most aspects of religion from my family. When we immigrated to the United States my family became a little more religious. We weren't exactly orthodox Jews, but I did go to a yeshiva for a year, I had a barmitzvah and went to Temple on the high holy days.

As I got older, I grew more distant from religion, but I had not yet abandoned it. I had not prayed in quite a few years, but at some point after Dylan's birth I said a prayer to god that if he could fix my child, I would become the most devout man on Earth. I would pray everyday, I would keep a kosher home and live an ultra-orthodox lifestyle. I would become a hasidic Jew if only god helped Dylan.

A few days of this obviously led nowhere. I gave up hope that this would help. I began to have private conversations with whatever higher deity or prophet would help him. I spoke to Jesus, Mohamed, John Smith, Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard, Zeus, Vishnu, Odin, Ra and any others I could think of.

I thought that whichever of them could help Dylan, I would become their most devout follower. I would renounce all other faiths, I would renounce all worldly possessions, I would make the rest of my life based around the worship of them. This once again was a pointless exercise in bargaining.

I was so desperate at that point to find something to help Dylan that I stated out loud that if Satan himself came before me and asked me to sign over my soul to him for all eternity in exchange for making my son normal, I would do it in a heartbeat.

After a few seconds of nothing happening, I came to the realization of how ridiculous all this bargaining was. There was no one man, god, or devil that could make Dylan normal. All my bargaining attempts just seemed incredibly silly and foolish to me in hindsight.

The bargaining stage is the only one of the 5 that has not recurred on a regular basis.

Of course, after bargaining, comes the hardest stage of all...