Links Link and Remembering Link 4/18/25

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

I’m traveling this week for my nephew’s memorial. Instead of posting links, I’ll direct you to Peter Greene’s recent link collection for some interesting education reads. It also happens to be Easter weekend so it’s a family trip of sorts. Regular posting will continue on schedule next week.

Link is also the name of my nephew. He was just over ten months old when he passed. Although any age is a terrible age to lose a child, I can only imagine that losing a baby (my own daughter is two) would be a special kind of devastation. What made Link’s brief life more complicated was the harsh trauma of his birth. Link was born lacking adequate oxygen to the brain due to, possibly, asphyxiating on his own meconium, a tarry black substance that coats the inside of the lungs and prevents the baby from taking adequate first breaths. This, in turn, led to his lifelong condition, Hypnotic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE). There is wide variation in outcomes for children with HIE but in most cases the brain damage sustained at birth somewhat limits future growth and development of the brain.

After the emergency c-section, Link was moved to two other hospitals. At that point in time his condition was among the rarest any child anywhere could have. Although somewhere around 1-2 children per 1000 will have HIE, less that one in a million will have the severity of complications Link would have. He was the sickest child in Georgia, possibly the whole Southeast. After having his body temperature lowered to prevent further brain damage, Link was placed on ECMO, a device many of us probably first heard of during the pandemic. ECMO machines oxygenate the blood so that your lungs may heal. Many severe COVID patients were placed on ECMO. These machines were invented for children like Link, who ended up in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, NICU. The initial bills for Link’s month-long stay in the NICU as well as for all the life-saving efforts following his birth exceeded one million dollars. Thankfully insurance came though on this one.

That said, Link was still a bundle of joy in so many ways. He was a pudgy little guy with tiny swirls in his brown hair — softer hair than I ever imagined possible. He was infinitely cozy and when you held him, as I did only twice briefly, you really felt your body mesh with his. His NG tube led to a lot of secretions that gurgled and popped in his throat as he breathed but, unexpectedly, this was part of Link’s charm. Because of his HIE, Link was still very much a newborn when I held him at eight months old but, if you’ve ever snuggled a newborn, imagine snuggling a much bigger one. He deserved every bit of affection we all gave him that Christmas.

Link’s parents, my sister-in-law and her husband are understandably distraught but more than their grief I want to recognize for a moment their heroism. They are heroes in the way that only parents can be. I heard somewhere that parenting is possibly the most altruistic thing someone can do. Parents can’t know how their child will turn out. There is no promise that they grow up to become good people. There is no guarantee children return love and care to the families who raised them. There is no knowing, when bringing them into this world, that children will survive. This is what makes parenting altruistic: giving, caring, and loving regardless. Link is a child who made the saying about altruism all the more true because his parents gave and cared and loved despite knowing he would likely never be able to reciprocate. Even in the best case, the damage to Link’s brain was so severe that he would not be able to eat and was instead fed through a tube in his nose. He wouldn’t be able to smile. There was some question of whether he could even see. They knew Link’s future in a way that few parents ever know. They did it without hope.

And it didn’t matter. It did, of course matter, but it also did not. Link’s parents were there day in and day out doing all the work parents of newborns everywhere are doing. But they were also changing his feeding tube, managing his medications, working with physical and occupational therapists, and bringing him to visit after visit with specialist after specialist. They were also both working full-time. Georgia, like most of America, does not mandate any maternity leave so my sister was back at work once her vacation and short-term disability were exhausted. But they did it, supported only once or twice some weeks by my mother-in-law. Even as it became clearer that Link would never develop many of the most basic human capacities that we all take for granted, they loved him even harder. It’s altruism and, more than that, heroism.

Though Link’s passing may lift many of those burdens and bring with it the complications of grief and relief all in one awful package, I hope that they can find some peace in knowing they did everything and more. I am not sure I would have the strength of mind and spirit to sustain in a year what they did daily for Link. I think the immensity of the loss of potential for a childhood, of hope, would have wrecked me. I’m sure at times they felt like it was wrecking them. And yet, they persisted in giving and caring and loving Link every single day.

We should all hope that we can love someone as altruistically, as heroically as they loved Link. We should all remember, especially in times like these, that even the Links of this world, perhaps them most of all, deserve heroes.