I will not describe, in any detail, what I saw when I pushed through that curtain.

I have decided, in the telling of this, that I will not catalog every mark the cold and the night had left on my son’s body, will not lay out the clinical particulars of what a nine-year-old looks like after hours in a freezing storm, because those details belong to him and not to a story, and because a child’s suffering is not something to be put on display.

It is enough to say that he was alive.

It is enough to say that a team of my own colleagues had him wrapped in warming blankets and were bringing him back, degree by degree, from the edge he had been standing on.