All Our Sons : ‘I’m trusting God to heal me either way. Dying is healing too, you know.’

There’s something special about the boy, a joy so bountiful and a life so resilient that to depict him now as a sackful of shredded dreams would be to ignore the abundance of light he has brought to the darkness that surrounds him.

In his 16 years, some of it painful beyond words, Jason Simon has maintained a balance that few achieve, much less sustain, through judgments of the soul that reduce us at the end to whimpers. Dying is not the best thing we do.

I write of him today not because easy words lie in a young man’s fight with cancer, but because the boy elevates the human spirit to a degree one rarely observes.

When I first met Jason, he was hunched forward in his bed, coughing violently and trying to breathe. A slim tube of oxygen ran from a tank to his nose, and another carried morphine into a vein of his arm. A humidifier hissed steam into the heavy air.

I am uneasy with the pain of others, especially the young, and tend to retreat in haste from scenes of anguish. I did so in this case by asking Jason’s parents to let him rest and to tell me about him in the living room downstairs.

Jason learned of his illness by accident when, at 13, he fell and hurt his leg. X-rays revealed not the consequences of a fall, but a rare form of cancer. The doctor was frank: The boy could lose his leg, even his life.

The shock was stunning. This was youth in the apex of innocence called upon to consider its own demise. Jason said nothing to the doctor, but later turned to his step-mother. “Mom,” he said with a sweetness that claws at the heart, “I could die.”

This is a family of “born-again” Christians. How much that had to do with Jason’s strength during the next three years might never be determined, but, quite obviously, it counted.

After six operations, two years of chemotherapy and more pain than most of us could ever imagine, Jason was asked by his father if he still had faith.

He replied by holding up a thumb and a forefinger to indicate an infinitesimal distance and said: “I’m this close to God. Why would I blow it now?”

Seated across from each other downstairs, the parents drew a loving portrait of a son who ran through the summers of his youth with innocent abandon, never dreaming to what dark end the race would take him.

“A loving, tender, caring boy,” Donna Simon called him.

“A boy who has never given up,” his father said.

I heard this also from teachers at the San Fernando Valley’s Monroe High, where, up until two months ago, Jason had been a student.

“I have not seen such a joy of life in anyone in 25 years of teaching,” one of them said.

From others:

“He wanted no special treatment. He wanted to earn everything he got. He never wanted to be considered a dying kid.”

“He cares more for others than for himself. He stays strong for the sake of us.”

Even as the disease spread, Jason drew from living what he could, but the quest was more altruistic than selfish.

“He never wanted to make anyone feel bad,” a student said. “He kept all the hurting for himself.”

He touched his classmates so deeply that they have begun on their own to raise funds for a scholarship in their friend’s honor.

How much pain Jason was enduring became clear in September when he announced that he wanted no more chemotherapy. Told he could be dead within six months, he said softly, “I’ve done all I can.”

The coughing from upstairs stopped. I asked the Simons if I could see Jason again. They led me once more to his room.

He was sitting up in bed this time, smiling. His eyes were as bright as spring. No fever glowed there. I spoke inanities, but even they took on significance with Jason’s replies.

“You look good,” I said, which was true.

“The problem isn’t on the outside,” Jason said. “It’s on the inside.”

I asked how he felt.

“I could never explain it,” he replied. “How do you describe the color red to a blind man?”

Then he said, “I’ve done the best I could for myself and my family, but now I’m tired and I want something to happen.”

Asked what he thought would happen, he said, “I’m trusting God to heal me either way.” Pause. “Dying is healing too, you know.”

Dylan Thomas understood the relationship between life and nature when he wrote: The force that through the green fuse drives the flowers drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

There is inevitability to the patterns that surround us and, like trees, we fall someday. Still, I’m angered by the darkness that claims one so young.

“Even when you trust in the Lord,” Donna Simon said, “a little boy is still scared.”

I left the house on Septo Street less saddened than overwhelmed by a sense of joy more prominent than pain.

I thought of Dylan Thomas then, too, and of those immense forces that claim the young too soon:

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose my youth is bent by the same wintry fever. . . . (Editor’s note: Jason Simon died Saturday night.)