Haley texted me this morning while I was in the dungeon, scribbling.

It was in this same position, doing exactly this same thing, this very day last year, that my sister-in-law called to tell me there had been an accident at the pool. “Enzo was under for a long time,” she said, and I was already out the door.

I raced to Alice Bell, where last week I paid our yearly dues, where by summer’s end the parents remarked what an incredible swimmer the little boy jumping off the platform was, and I had to say—“Well, remember that kid in May, and the fire trucks, and the ambulance…”

The entire drive I thought of how marriages end when children die, and I prayed that ours wouldn’t, because I wasn’t there and I didn’t know what to expect. How could I not be there? I thought. A father can save his child from anything, I believed, wrongly.

But, by the grace of God, as a Quaker once taught me to say, Enzo is alive.

Last week, he was catching salamanders in the slimy puddle at the bottom of a friend’s drained pool. Friday, he was eating dirt with another friend at Suttree Landing Park, the place I took Haley for a walk on our first date in 2017 and asked her to marry me eight months later. Just 20 yards down from that bench, this very-alive boy was making dust angels and pulling down his pants to pee in the bushes.

It is pool season again. A terror pulses inside my wife and me, with 1-year-old who’s even more inclined to disorder than his older brother, and who’s not-yet ready for Ms. Mildred, the Iron Lady of Farragut who teaches terrified children—my Enzo included—to swim by throwing them headfirst in the pool, then tells their horrified mothers to quit crying, because, “They either learn, or they will drown.”

Earlier this month, on the other side of Knoxville, a 3-year-old died in a pool. Another, the child of a famous person in Utah, drowned in their backyard. “Drowning is the leading cause of death for children between 1 and 4 years old,” the CDC says. And I don’t know if the algorithm feeds me the news cruelly or if it’s just another trending topic.

I don’t like to take soapbox stances about these kinds of things, but I will say that I never appreciated the importance of swim lessons and pool safety until Enzo didn’t have his floaties on for a second and tried to walk in the pool to save a toy.

At the hospital that night, he told us he saw God. And I’m no Pentecostal—the supernatural reads to me like fantasy—but the boy could barely string together a sentence when he told his mama not to worry, God helped him.

A friend had pulled him out, my wife had breathed the air back in his lungs as he laid there unconscious and blue, and the ambulance that not one week would later send bill us than a thousand dollars got him to Children’s Hospital, where the doctor on call reassured us, “He’s going to be fine. Trust me, I would tell you if he wasn’t.” Because doctors on duty in summer know the fine line between life and death.

Two weekends ago, I was in Bayonne visiting my parents. I flew out with the two big kids and split a room with Enzo, who, as usual, was up before 6 a.m. After a brief but intense round of wrestling, everyone else in the house remained asleep. So we headed out on our Man Walks—the tradition we started in October, in place of my previous travel tradition of sleeping in and/or reading a book quietly while drinking coffee. He was in his jammies and, with the playgrounds closed, wanted to see the ships and ask what kind of bass and sharks and dinosaurs were in the water that separated Bayonne from the port.

The walks have become my favorite thing. The conversations are spellbinding, the kinds of stream-of-consciousness rambles that pull your hearts closer together because it’s clear that any barrier separating them is an illusion.

Our children could die at any moment.

We could die. The stress inside might finally trigger the brain aneurysm I’m sure is waiting just around the corner. The airplane on its way to Newark might careen into the sea. A semi-truck might trample us on our way to the YMCA.

But my boy is alive.

He is catching worms, memorizing the names of dinosaurs, trying to decide, this week, between being a motorcycle driver and a “trouterman” when he grows up.

He stomps his feet when he’s angry, pees all over the toilet seat, and does front flips off his bed onto the carpet, then explodes into giggles before doing it again and again. His older sister joins him, and the baby strolls in, screaming “Más! Más!” which is his way of asking if you’ll throw him around, too.

Of all the ways I imagined my children could be hurt, I never pictured it would be nearly drowning in a busy pool on a summer afternoon, with a hundred bystanders. But a child’s drowning is a silent death. There is no screaming or splashing.

In my case, and for reasons I will never understand, whether God’s favor, a stroke of luck, or the unhesitating action of a mother who would empty her lungs of air to fill those of her children, the blue trained from his lips and Enzo was back.

I can hear him upstairs now, romping like a gorilla, listening to Spidey on his Toniebox while the others sleep soundly, blessed not to have to think about what life would be like without him.

Don’t let money be an excuse not to teach your kids to swim if your family is going to be around water this summer. Some of the most affordable lessons are at the YMCA, and they offer them year-round. Happy to help direct you if you’d like to learn more.

Related stories you may enjoy:

• “Sometimes, Finland,” a preface about Enzo’s accident, suffering, and translation of Hernán Casciari’s story about the tragedies you never forget.

• “What Makes a Man,” a reflection on masculinity, legacy, and children.

• “Ride-or-Dies” about going on Man Walks with my boys in Alabama.

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