Crippled: An Appeal to Motorists
I
I AM writing on the back of old hospital charts. I found this stub of a pencil in my handbag. By propping myself on an elbow I can feel the pencil’s way across the paper in this scant light. For harder surface on the bed I have spread out a year-old copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal — that one in which was printed Paul de Kruif’s article called ‘Milwaukee’s Death Fight.’ It is a good article. It tells with carefully measured horror of the killings by motorcars in the United States. I take but one exception to it: Paul de Kruif has written nothing about those whom the motorcars leave behind — still living. He does not write of the cripples.
If they knew, the doctors and nurses would not let me write — they would take away these poor tools. But I cover them up when the night nurse comes in and feign drowsiness. This writing tonight is all that stands between me and sanity; drugs seem to have no power of commitment to-night; sleep seems as far removed as death — now.
I am not the good craftsman that Paul de Kruif is; I shall make but a poor job of this. But I have that which he had not — a something that compels me, that will not leave me inert, silent. De Kruif wrote of thirty thousand; I write of one. His was a laboratory survey; mine is an immediate human document.
Across the narrow stretch of room, in his cot, lies my John Paul, whimpering. For twenty days he has been whimpering. It has taken an amazing lot of drugs to keep under so small a boy. At rare intervals the whimperings become words; they break through his stupor, like embedded needles working their way to the surface. ‘Mummy, I want to get up. Please, Mummy!’
John Paul is four years old. He will never get up again — that is, never as a whole, free, exultant little boy. He will never throw back the covers of his cot, shoot across his room and ours, and drop like a plummet, stomach down, on our bed, shouting, ‘ Here I come — Daddy and Mum —Daddy and Mum! It’s time to get up — up — up!’ Nor will he take the stairs, down, at a gallop, chanting, ‘I’ll set the table. Knives and forks, napkins and spoons, porridge and prunes,’ and burst into ecstatic laughter because he has found words with singing sounds. I have read words with stabs of agony in them; but I have never written them before. We think of terrible things always happening to that mythical ‘other person,’ somebody who bears no relationship to us — no close relationship. Well, I am that ‘other person.’
Sometimes John Paul plucks at his chest with his uninjured hand and says: ‘Take it off, please, Mummy. It’s so heavy.’ He is in a plaster cast from his throat to his thighs; there are casts on his legs and one arm. There is a metal contrivance around his neck to support his head; it is set into the cast on his body. He looks like a tiny bird trussed up with a steel girder. Take wings from a bird, and all power to fly — would he still be a bird? I say, No! As I say that all childhood has ended for John Paul at four years of age. The attributes of childhood are freedom, unlimited faith, joy unrestrained; take these away and what is left?
II
In the twenty days we have been here I have had many letters. They have taught me the meaning of the words ‘black laughter.’ This has nothing to do with race or color; it is the laughter that comes from a heart sunk in perpetual night. They have meant to be kind — those letters. They have succeeded in being ghastly; for they have bidden me to thank God that the life of my boy has been spared. Many have come from strangers — from parents whose children have been killed outright in accidents. They think that God has shown me a special mercy because John Paul is going to live. I wish they could hear him whimpering now.
For the last two or three days the doctors and nurses have worn a different face. They have begun to smile and talk of miracles. There is a kind of vainglory in their voices; and how can they keep it out? Throughout these twenty sullen days they have done superb watching and working. They have called it good teamwork — the X-ray man, the surgeon, a doctor, a bone specialist, two nurses, all trying to compensate for what a boy in one instant did because he was late for his date with a girl. Inch by inch they have beaten death back — while I have prayed the victory would not be to them. At first they hoped nothing; I don’t think they expected John Paul to live through that first night. After that they shook their heads and said they did not know — they could not tell. Their faces looked less grim; they talked about hope. But to-day they could not keep their voices down when they said, He will live!’ It sounded like shouting.
Those words have stayed imprisoned in the room all to-day. To-night they are booming and beating back at me like devil drums: ‘He will live — live — live!’ No one who has not prayed that death might come to a beloved one can understand. I feel ground under those same wheels which went over John Paul — inanimate, senseless instruments which knew nothing of the recklessness that guided them or of their ghastly accomplishment. Every night drugs have snuffed out my consciousness for a few merciful hours; I have been able to go to sleep praying, ‘Please, God, let John Paul go before another day.’ But tonight I think there is no power in heaven or on earth to bring oblivion. I must face life; I must face all its implications and fears for the three of us.
Writers have dealt well, understandingly, with death; they have given to it many faces, horrible, benign, antic; but few have seen life wearing that ghoulish, grinning mask it wears for me. I know every line in it; I could mould it with my two hands. And, having done it, I must break it, smash it until there is nothing left of it but dust; and then, with these same two hands, try to make for life a mask which will not frighten my John Paul — that he will find in it something of mercy, something of love, something of faith. And how? Can anyone tell me how I am going to do this?
First I must face a lie — and live it, convincingly, cheerfully. We must live it between us, big Paul and I, and say nothing of it. No one must know that we arc not glad our child is to live. All our lives we must act as if we thanked God that we have in our keeping this small crushed body, somehow held together, made to function again, that it may live in torment. We must not inwardly curse because a spirit once so blithe, so free and joyous, lies caged under our eyes. I could put an end to that caging so easily to-night did I not believe in God — that in His power alone lie the giving and the taking of life. It may strike many as idiotic, after what has happened to John Paul, that his mother’s faith can go on. But it does. I cannot hold God accountable; it is n’t that kind of God I believe in. This keeps me from finishing that murder someone began and just failed to finish. A little more and the spinal cord would have been severed, the head hopelessly fractured.
I look at the years that stretch ahead of us and wonder. For the present John Paul will do his living on a wheeled stretcher — that much the doctors know. After that a wheel chair, perhaps; at best, a brace and crutches. Big Paul and I shall have to watch the spirit of a child hurled suddenly into man’s growth. What will it do to him? Shall we accumulate that courage and wisdom to outstride the years by a little margin and so make plain and easier the way?
There will be winters when the three of us will watch other boys buckling on their skis, slinging skates over hockey sticks and taking the road to the pond. There will be summers with bicycles and tennis rackets, and the lake to swim in; boy scouts hiking by, blanket rolls on their backs, their faces tilted upwards to far horizons. Can we by grit and prayer help John Paul perform that miracle of freeing his spirit to a far horizon, sending it forth to skim ice, top snowbound hills, follow the trail with the strong, free bodies of other boys? This much I know, for which I can be honestly thankful — John Paul can never drive a car at fifty miles an hour around a corner and, by so doing, cage another’s spirit in a helpless body.
We have known two boys who have grown up in wheel chairs. Both of them have turned out beasts, taking almost the only pleasure they could feel in making others suffer. Life and their limitations have bitten into them deep — like an acid. They might have whined and cringed; instead, their spirits have turned bitter as gall. They have armed themselves against all compassion, all companionship; they stand out lonely and rebellious souls. One of these was dropped as a baby by a nursegirl; he has scored his parents throughout a lifetime for not letting him die. The other as a little boy was thrown out of a team, behind runaway horses; he has grown up into the cruelest man I have ever known. How are we going to keep John Paul from becoming as one of these?
To-night I am afraid of everything. I am afraid of the world — it is no longer a secure world; I am afraid of those who people it — they can no longer be trusted; I am afraid of life and what it may do, not only to John Paul, but to his father and me. We are very young, untempered. If human beings are main channels through which a divine love and wisdom can reach this earth, big Paul and I will make but twisted and clogged ones, I am afraid. He was twenty-three, I was nineteen, when John Paul was born. Even now life and college seem to have taught me nothing I need to know. My mind, my whole nature, are as little trained for what lies ahead of me as John Paul is trained to build dams to hold back immense volumes of water; my soul lies as smashed as his body. And yet I must teach a young soul to run free, to shout and be glad, even while it dwells in a tortured body. I know of no school or college that trains for such a life; I know of no graduate teachers of young souls.
Big Paul is, at twenty-seven, an instructor in our university; his salary is very small. Up to now, money has not seemed to matter a great deal. We have had love and youth and John Paul. Now we are facing what for even moderately wealthy people means an enormous expense. John Paul must have everything that money can buy to make him more comfortable, less helpless, less set apart from normal childhood, and he must be given a chance for man-growth to be fine, sound, disciplined from within, that he may not be warped in anything but body. If we set aside for ourselves the lowest possible living expense, we can never provide and pay for those necessities our son must have. If we allow ourselves only enough to cover the bare bones of living, we shall still be always in debt; we shall never die solvent.
And that does not trouble me, except indirectly. Can we, perpetually shouldering a debt, keep the burden of it from settling somehow on John Paul’s shoulders? If he continues to love us, to hold us blameless, will he not grow disturbed, fretful, because of what we carry? What I am trying to write is — can his father and I so detach ourselves from debtconsciousness that even the shadow of it will not rest over our life for our son to mark? It must be so — but how?
We have only rarely had outside help in our small home. We have made little of our work and done it pleasantly, together. We have made much of little happinesses, picnics and bus rides, holidays and friendships; these we have shared almost equally, the three of us. Winters we skated, with John Paul buckled into his sled; summers we swam while he paddled; we played tennis, while he shouted the score after us and ran for the balls that went over the back nets. Now, for a time at least, this togetherness cannot go on. Big Paul must take his recreation, and I what I need for a sound, refreshed mind, apart.
I am writing things as I think them out — groping along a blind path. I must learn to be all things to John Paul; I must renew a glad spirit within me. Like the Hindu magician’s rosebush, I must grow from seed to a full-blooming almost at the wink of an eye. Right now I must know what to say to John Paul when there are no longer drugs to dull his consciousness and he plucks at his plaster cast as he is doing now and begs, ‘Mummy, take it off. It’s so heavy — please, Mummy!’ Through some divine agency can I help him bear that weight — help him lie still and not let his spirit corrode in the interminable weeks and months ahead of us? How am I going to reconcile a little boy four years old to a belief in the mercy and love of that God to whom I pray?
III
I have said that money — the lack of it — concerned us little. I was wrong. It concerned us more than we knew. It meant we shared a house on a street that was not so desirable for a little boy to play on. There is a traffic light at one end; this slows up the through traffic, but it does not keep a car from turning the corner at fifty miles. I can see that car still coming. Even when the drugs have worked, the last thing I remember is trying to spring from my chair on the porch and crying, ‘Don’t go after the kitty, John Paul! DON’T!’
The doctors and nurses have said many times that they never could have managed to do so much for John Paul if he had not been such a biddable child; even drugged, he somehow hears and tries to do what he is told. We have used do’s and don’t’s with him so little; but the don’t’s have always been heeded — except that one.
The night nurse has been in to see if I was asleep. Satisfied, she has eased John Paul to his pillows, given him a drink through his tube, then stood and looked down at him so long I wanted to scream. What was she thinking? Perhaps she, too, thinks that surgery and medicine, that skilled care, are not always so merciful. But it is not her business to tell me that.
John Paul breaks out in his whimpering. He is speaking more distinctly: ‘Please, Mummy, please, I want to get up.’ A sob comes from across the room. I think it’s the nurse, and that’s funny. I have always thought her excellent, but hard-surfaced. Maybe she has to be to nurse the John Pauls that come through the emergency entrance of the hospital.
She’s gone, and I go over again and again that afternoon. I was sitting on the porch, sewing on one of those few little dresses needed for that brother or sister of John Paul’s that we had expected in four more months. John Paul was running his scooter down the sidewalk, the gray kitten at his heels. That kitten had a predecessor; only it was black and white. In the early summer it was playing on the steps with John Paul one minute — the next it had darted out into the street and was run over by a car. John Paul saw it, smashed so flat and bloody on the roadway that we had to scrape it up with his sand shovel to bury it and get it at least beyond reach of eye.
On this afternoon — a full month later — John Paul had stopped by the curb to ring the little bell he has on his handle bar; the kitten had hopped sidewise to jump for his fingers, and then had made one of those swift darts over the curb, towards the centre of the street. John Paul saw the car coming before I did. The little boy had seen that other car which had killed the black and white kitten, and I suppose it flashed through his brain that this one would be smashed the same way. I heard the scooter go over as he sprang after the kitten. He was off the curb before I called. I don’t think he even heard me, he was so intent on getting the kitten before the car did; the arm that held the kitten, safe, was the only part of him that was not injured.
The boy stopped and came back. He had no license; he was driving a borrowed car. He said straightforwardly to the police: ‘I was going fifty — late for a date.’ He is a restless, nervous, shallow boy; he does n’t know what he has done. He has come often to the hospital to ask after John Paul; and this afternoon he met big Paul just outside. When he heard what the doctors had said, he was relieved of all responsibility. ‘Gee, I’m glad. If he’d died now I’d have felt awful.’ There is no case against him; he has no money to lose. He is probably thanking his stars to-night that he got out of it so easily.
I am not writing just as John Paul’s mother; I am writing for all mothers — all people who have had to suffer for this senseless, irresponsible crippling of someone dear to them, who have had to rebuild lives as I shall have to.
Is there no executive or power to speak for these fifty thousand crippled each year by someone’s negligence? Is there no way of arousing the conscience of the drivers of this nation? For centuries men have written that we have war because at heart men like to fight. Well — there have always been battles to be fought that did not involve killing human beings; there have always been greater victories to win than those won by one warring people against another. Here is a fight worthy of a nation’s mettle; is it not a better thing to fight to save life than to mutilate it?
The nurse has been in again. I must stop. But if there be those who read of my John Paul, pray God they may think on and for other childhood — the whole, the able, the free; and may they be stirred beyond peace of mind or rest of body.