My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [87]
My son Chris’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Jessica, was at home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where she lived with her mother. She was fighting a mild fever brought on by chicken pox. Feeling crummy, she took four baby aspirins. I’m sure she thought she was helping herself. Instead, by taking those aspirin, she inadvertently triggered a fatal infection that went straight to her liver and brain. Three days later, she fell violently ill and was rushed to the hospital, where exactly a week after taking the aspirin, she died, the result of a rare disease known as Reye’s syndrome.
First reported in 1963, Reye’s was and still is a medical mystery whose cause is largely unknown but connected to people—mostly children—who take aspirin when they have viral infections like the flu or chicken pox. At the time, there were warnings in small print on most but not all bottles of aspirin. “God knows,” Jessica’s stepfather told the L.A. Times, “we never knew about Reye’s syndrome.” None of us did.
But it changed all of our lives forever. Chris came in from Annapolis, where he was a lobbyist for Nike. By the time I jetted back east from Vancouver, Jessica was gone. The loss destroyed everyone—Chris, Jessica’s mom, her stepfather, me, Michelle, Margie, the whole family, and countless others in her school and community who knew her.
My first grandchild was a bright, vibrant girl just coming into her own. She played sports, liked the outdoors, and wrote poetry. Always precocious, Jessica had been putting her thoughts on paper for years. Her feelings reflected an old soul, someone concerned with the big, more profound issues of love and death and the relative brevity of life. “A special girl,” her parents said of her—and indeed, that was true of the eleven-year-old who wrote this poem titled “Dreams”:
All is white,
Objects floating everywhere,
People sleepwalking through life,
Stopping, picking up reality, walking on.
Suddenly a flash,
Out of a dreamworld into reality;
Nothing can last forever.
Only some people never see the flash.
My mind drifted back to a day a year or two earlier when she’d been staying with Chris and his wife, Christine, on the boat where they lived in Annapolis. Both of them had gone to work and left me to watch Jessica. She was all questions, nonstop questions about life, religion, our family history, the universe, everything. She kept me talking all day. It was one of the best and most challenging conversations of my life.
That night, I took her out to dinner and she was absolutely fascinated that everyone knew me. All night long people asked for autographs or said they had enjoyed my work, and each time Jessica looked at me with wide eyes, trying to figure out what was going on. She couldn’t believe it.
“Are you special, Grandpa?” she asked.
“No more or less than anyone else,” I said.
“Can I be like that someday?” she asked.
“You already are,” I said.
Time lessened the immediate pain of losing Jessica, but there was no getting over the loss of someone with so much potential at such a young age. I could not begin to count how many times I asked myself “Why?” The poets have talked about sorrow reminding us of the stuff that matters in our life, but still, why? Why a child? I returned to the many theologians and philosophers I had read, brilliant people who had explored the existence of God, His will, and the meaning of life. Had they said anything about the meaning of life in the aftermath of such a shattering experience?
As near as I could figure, no one had ever said anything on the subject better than Jessica herself. I got out her poems, a little book she put together called Collected Poems, which I had saved for years, and I reread the verse that had flowed from her heart. I saw that she got it, she understood, she knew that