He stood there, dignified, in his polyester fastfood uniform, earnestly waiting for the bus and oblivious to the river of traffic around him, to the forced smiles and brief, uneasy glances from passersby.
In a world of multiple urgencies and lives racing at 50 mghz, he had one focus only--in this case, the Laurel Canyon bus to McDonald' s. He was alone, and he needed to concentrate. He had a job. That meant a schedule and responsibilities.
Stopped at the light, I watched him through my windshield. He was eighteen or so, short black hair slightly askew, with the thick body and unfinished facial features so common to Down's syndrome. Three years ago, I would have looked away, just as the other people nearby on the street were doing now.
But instead I just watched. I find that I can't look away anymore, not from Down's people, not since Danny...
You discover a lot about yourself. I assumed, with the callousness writers seem to perfect, that this "Danny thing" would be the source of so much good material. Well, he is; but not remotely in the way I expected. For the two years since his birth, every time I've sat down to write about him, an arctic silence has settled into my head. Danny will not be used. He is too intimate, too demanding, too funny, too eager to play; he does not fit conveniently into a prefabbed holding pen for the mentally handicapped. And I am too ignorant and not far enough along the road to offer any advice, other than to recount the experience of my own family.
I know that this is doable. It hasn't been easy, but it hasn't been a cross either. You stop thinking like that. Danny's just here, he's part of our normal routine. You adjust. Our manage has the same love and strengths, and also the same faultlines, it always had. So does the family. You learn to stop melodramatizing; you get tired of your own bathos.
I also know that we've been given a gift. A friend, Chicago novelist Patrick Creevy (Lake Shore Drive), the brother of one Down's person and father of a Down's daughter, puts it this way: "The best thing [about a mentally handicapped child] is having a son or a daughter in whom you're never disappointed; you're absolutely out of the business of disappointment .... So many of the expectations that in parents turn tragic, we're safe from. And in its place comes this wonderful, unconditional love, an unburdening from the hunger for perfection."
It's a kind of redemption. You enter a community--parents of sick and handicapped children--filled with far harder stories than Down's syndrome; where quiet, heroic love is an ordinary affair, and you learn from it.
Francis X. Maier is Chancellor for the Archdiocese of Denver and Special Assistant to Archbishop Chaput. This article first appeared in Commonweal magazine. Full article available at Be Not Afraid.
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