GOD’S UNWITTING MESSENGERS: A REFLECTION ON MY RETARDED BROTHER

This is about my eldest brother (though really much more) who recently passed on at the age of 80.  My mother had experienced a difficult labor and the doctor at the time took to assisting Sherwin’s entry into the world with forceps.  There are some risks to both mother and child in such a procedure, and in our family’s case, my brother was accidentally brain damaged.  It left him partially paralyzed from birth and incapable of developing intellectually beyond that of a five or six year old.

By the time I entered this world, there were some eighteen years between us.  My mother was no longer able to handle Sherwin and he ended up a resident in a number of institutions for retarded individuals.  And yes—that’s what he was, retarded.  We didn’t say “developmentally disabled” or any of those other pc locutions.  We said the word respectfully and somberly.   It was not an epithet designed to generate laughter—there was nothing funny about this situation.  The word bore, for my mother, a degree of shame and guilt that she could never shake.  It shouldn’t have meant any of those things to her, but it did.  We were a family with a retarded child.

My earliest memories of visiting Sherwin in the Faribault, MN mental institution go back to the early 60’s.  We first had to go to a central office to announce our presence.  The central office called the building where Sherwin resided (the institution was a complex of several large buildings) to inform the staff that family was in to visit.  We drove to the building and then my father or mother would walk in, me tagging along, to retrieve Sherwin.  Inside the building was a world both mesmerizing and frightening.  People in wheel chairs staring listlessly, kids in football helmets spinning endlessly, residents with deformed faces hobbling about, their clothes in varying degrees of disarray.  Some residents would walk straight up to you and start talking nonsensically.  And then came Sherwin—bolting out of the double doors with a big crooked smile on his face.

His body was unaligned, the left side always drooping downward.  You’d think he would fall the way he walked, and sometimes he did.  But he was always so excited for those Saturday afternoon visits, as he knew he would get a car ride in the countryside, see some eighteen-wheelers, on a lucky day—a freight train—and be treated to an ice cream cone or his favorite, a chocolate shake.  He inhaled those shakes.  My mother would reprimand him to drink slower.  But he had two speeds: slurping and super slurping.

My mother, who was a talented baker, would bring him brownies and nut bars.  And on Purim, she would be sure to bring him her perfectly constructed hammantaschen which he devoured in single bites.  On Passover, my parents brought him boxes of matzah.  They always strove to remind him that in the gentile world of the mental institution, he was a Jew.  But my two very Jewish parents were working against forces much stronger than their own aspirations.  When asked what he had for breakfast, Sherwin would often shout with glee and without hesitation, “Pork chops,” which provoked a series of “Oy vey”s from my parents and laughter from his siblings. He would respond to our questions with two or three words—no more.  And if we asked him too many questions, he often drifted into his own world and simply emitted a sound—“Bah.”

Loving Sherwin was not without its complications.  On the one hand, how can you not love your big brother?  On the other hand, how can one love a person, albeit innocent, who nonetheless is a source of pain and guilt to one’s parents?  Yet I knew they loved him deeply, and if he were to God forbid die during their lifetime, that would have finished them off forever.  I prayed that he outlive them both.  He did.  Go Sherwin!

Then, of course, there was always the question of how God could have done this to our family.  Was it a test?  Was it a punishment?  Was it some cruel cosmic joke?  All this brought me to ponder what life might have been like without him.  How would I be different?  And without Sherwin, my life and the life of my other brother and sister, would indeed be very different.  Sherwin was a very visceral, dramatic and cogent demonstration of the tenuous and delicate nature of life, the healing power of love and compassion, and the 24/7 gratitude we all ought to feel that our bodies and minds don’t face the challenges that his did.  Lest we think that he or any of his retarded compatriots were anything less than human, our tradition provided us with a blessing upon seeing such individuals—Praise are You, YHVH, who leads us through this magnificent universe, who creates a diversity of living things.

Actually, I never believed that God created Sherwin as he was.  That was human error.  But my family made sure to make me see the image of God he bore, the very same image borne by all humanity.  The diversity blessing thus stood.

After my mother’s death in 2009, my sister took over as the Protector in Chief of Sherwin.  His body, particularly his gastrointestinal track, was showing signs of wear and tear.  The State of Minnesota, of which Sherwin was a ward, and to which we owe a great debt for Sherwin’s care, was always a little too eager to do surgery.  There was no malice there and no nefarious objectives, but the family did not see the risk of surgery commensurate with the reward.  And my sister, Jackie, channeling my mother no doubt, would just not let it happen, to the point where she legally replaced the state-appointed guardian with herself.  There were any number of battles fought to protect him from the scalpel, and when Sherwin left us, he left because he was no longer able to absorb any nutrition, not a brownie, not a shake, and certainly not a pork chop.

Toward his last day or so, Jackie called me and asked if it would be appropriate to recite a prayer for Sherwin, especially while she and my brother-in-law Hal, and other family members were present at his bedside.  I’ve recited prayers for the dying many times but only in their presence, never over the phone, and never while riding the Long Island Railroad to Manhattan’s Penn Station.  Oh well—when is it wrong to pray and who among us hasn’t prayed while riding the LIRR?  So I mustered a few words of prayer, reminded Sherwin of all the people who love him, and all the people he touched in his own life, and how Mommy and Daddy were with him in that room.  I sealed the prayer with the Shema and the last words of Adon Olam which affirm that we are never alone in this world, especially when facing the final journey of our lives.  Sherwin died within 24 hours.  He died about as whole as an 80 year old mentally and physically incapacitated man can, in a deep sleep, and surrounded by people he loved and who loved him.  Of the more puzzling verses in Ecclesiastes is—“…better the day of death than the day of birth” (Ec. 7:1), a rather outrageous claim if ever there was one.  But in Sherwin’s case, Ecclesiastes may just have nailed it.

I assume no special privileges with the good Lord, in spite of my many years in His employ.  I imagine I’ve got God’s ear as much as the next guy, though I don’t pretend to be in any position to tell Him what to do.  But were I in that position, and if the kabbalists are right about the doctrine of reincarnation, then I would ask God to give my parents, in their next lives, a family free of a child with such disabilities.  And as for Sherwin, in spite of all the reasons he gave us to think about the larger issues in life—compassion, gratitude, the vicissitudes of nature—I’d still ask God to give him a second shot.  He deserved better.  And all those precious lessons that I learned from him, I’d be happy to relearn, but at no other person’s expense.  Though I wonder if that is even possible.  And here is the scariest thought—maybe we “normal” humans don’t learn these lessons until people like Sherwin thrust them into our lives.  And maybe that is the ultimate meaning of their lives, to act as God’s unwitting messengers for the many of us who get caught in the petty and the trivial, missing the more enduring and profound, our “normal” mental and emotional faculties to sort it all out being so terribly retarded.