As I turned off the shower I stood shin-deep in bath water tonight. Exhausted from a long weekend and a longer Monday, I was ready to get Ben and myself out of the tub (he plays in the bath water while I shower) and off to bed. But as he heard the water shut off he pleaded up, “Stay in tub, Daddy, stay in tub.”

I am comfortable with a certain level of regret, we all have a certain tolerance level for it, but I can nearly always be goaded to pause and revel when a bright moment shines. So, I plopped down in the tepid bath water and we played together a few minutes longer. We did what may be his first math together: counting how many Ben’s-cups of water it takes to fill up an empty Daddy-cup . I also showed him how to trap and release bubbles under an inverted cup.

After a few minutes it was getting cold and time to move on, so as usual I asked him to, “Pull the plug, Ben.” He dutifully puts in and takes out the bath plug every bath, but this time he protested, “Stay in bath, Daddy.”

“No, Ben, it’s time to pull the plug. Pull the plug, Ben.”

I’ve said it a hundred times to Ben but for the first time those words glowed dimly of some future day when, after another too brief time, perhaps twenty years, perhaps seventy, Ben and his siblings will very likely be the ones, as the result of modern medicine and its modern death, to decide whether my body keeps artificially living or dies. And the fact is tonight I strung one more memory on that bright and shining strand with my beaming boy. The fact is his little soul may be far wiser, gentler, and good than mine, but for whatever reason I came before him, I am the father to his son, and by virtue of that fact get to show him little wonders like trapped air bubbles and counting.

But the time will come when those memories are all made and in many ways I will become the helpless child to his adult and he will hold my little life in his hands.

He did. And he will.