One time, I was walking up Delhi Street in Guelph, Ontario. The incline was slight. Overcast sky, about 11:15 am. My son had been taken to the Guelph General Hospital by ambulance a few minutes before. I walked up the street wondering if he was still alive. Did the seizure cease? I thought. Or did he stop breathing? He had convulsed for so long . . .

At the top of the hill, the hospital. Police cars idled at the entrance. No ambulances blaring in, or out. It was then I made the deal, the one that continues to define my existence. I reached way back in time, but also forward. I looked up to the sky like a hundred million agnostics before me and said, “Please, don’t let him die. I’ll do anything.” This was a prayer sent with fury, beyond the blue. 

He didn’t die. But that was also the price of my asking, that he wouldn’t be the same, that he couldn’t be cured, that his diagnosis was deferred. Saving is a story about how a young family saved itself, for lack of anyone else to do that work – a story about a sick little girl and boy, children of a mad father, himself the child of another mad father, all of us adrift in an uncaring medical system.