This Ends Happily

Tales of Differently-Abled Week

Dear Republic,

This week is mostly dedicated to summertime and its pleasures. That tends to mean upscale sports, but it also extends to Jack Bouchard’s heartbreaking piece about working at a camp for adults with developmental disabilities.

-ROL

THIS ENDS HAPPILY

I was eighteen when I started working at Camp. I went there as a camper and, seeking a reason to be away from home for the summer, decided I’d like to be a counselor. I ended up working there for eight summers. When I showed up to orientation my first week, I was anticipating the camp session I went to: a bunch of middle and elementary aged boys playing sports for two weeks. But Camp also runs Differently-Abled Week, where men and women ages 16-85 (there is no real age limit, but we have had campers that old ) with mental disabilities stay for a week to experience sleep-away camp.

Camp is run by the local Diocese. We have Mass the first night of Differently-Abled Week. We meet in the old chapel — a white, steepled building topped with teetering brass crosses. Let’s say this is the summer of 2014. Having been promoted to Head Staff, I don’t have an assigned cabin anymore. I squeeze in with Cabin 31, right next to S. He was in my cabin last year. The poor kid is afraid of thunder. He freezes in place and just shakes whenever he hears it. And by kid I mean he’s forty-two. Sit with me for a minute.

Campers are still shuffling into their seats as Father starts us on our welcoming song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” You can sing it, he always says, with your voices and with your hands. Counselors usher their campers into pews. We rock the “itty bitty baby” and point at “you and me brother.”

When we have finally assembled (the Differently-Abled schedule boils down to “whenever you get there”) Father begins Mass. When we get to the readings, he calls up a volunteer. One of the girls gets up eagerly. Father reads over her shoulder. I think she’s in her thirties or forties. She strings together two words, then the priest helps her with a more complicated one, whispering the pronunciation into her ear once or sometimes several times. She never messes up on Jesus though, and gives it extra oomph at every opportunity. A funereal silence hangs over the congregation as 1 Corinthians claws along in broken mumblings punctuated by proud exclamations of “Jesus!”

A camper named G is sitting over with Cabin 13. G is in his early sixties. He’s pear-shaped and bald, wears big, black-rimmed glasses and walks with a cane. Every summer, G comes to camp dressed in a three-piece suit paired with a velcro-strapped hat that reads “I AM THE BOSS.” He works in politics. I’m not sure what he does, except that he worked for the Obama campaign in 2012.

He was in my cabin last year. He woke me up at 6 AM on the first morning demanding that I take him over to the showers.

“G, we don’t shower now. We have showers in the afternoon.”

“What? I shower at six every single morning.”

We must have argued for fifteen minutes before he would go back to bed. There were a million other things that he’d be on us about: his back brace, his glasses, his cane, his hearing aids. That same morning he wanted a shower, he discovered that he hadn’t packed a belt. We suggested that he just wear the suspenders he had on the day before, but that was impossible. He couldn’t wear the suspenders with his jeans, because they only went with the suit. I ended up loaning him one of mine, just to get him out of the cabin.

G had this chair. It was a folding lawn chair with woven vinyl strips in blue and yellow making the seat and back. G insisted on making one of us carry it to every activity. Then, he would sit in the blazing noonday sun, drinking a Diet Coke from the case he brought from his group home, badgering us about how woozy he felt.

“Drink water, G,” we’d say, “you’re dehydrated.”

“No. I don’t drink water. I only drink soda.”

Seth, one of the other counselors in 13 that year, came up with a theory about G.

“Maybe,” he said to me one night after lights out, “G’s problem isn’t his developmental disability, it’s that he’s a crabby old man.” I laughed. We were in canteen, which is this building for counselors to hang out in for a few hours after the campers are asleep. There’s a flat top grill for fixing up Sysco cheese burgers and some fridges full of soda and Twinkies. It gets loud. Everyone walks in as soon as taps is over, just itching to unleash a pile of tension from the day. We do camper impersonations. I remember walking around like I was holding G’s cane and complaining about my vertigo and trying to get people to wash my back in the shower.

Sometime during the second reading, a camper starts crying. She’s yelling “Momma!” and her counselor is trying to calm her down. A lot of the people in this crowd are old enough to have seen their parents die. It doesn’t matter how long ago they died. It could have been a decade ago or more. They come back to the moment of the funeral every time they go into a church. For the rest of their lives, past when their original caregivers die and they’re living in institutions and group homes, they lose their first contact with the world over and over again.

She won’t stop crying. Seeing no quick way to resolve the situation, her counselor takes her by the hand and starts hustling her out of the pew and into the aisle. They walked from the front pew all the way down the aisle to the door at the back. A short mop of light brown hair, bangs cut straight across the front, the rest falling just past the ears with a faded baseball cap perched on top. She’s short and stocky. She wears a pink shirt with a flower design on the front, the petals embellished with glitter glue. The first time I saw this, I made sure to look at everything except the person crying.

I like how I say first time as if that’s changed.

One of my old campers isn’t here. His name was K. It was his first summer at Camp when he was in my cabin. I always remember him the same way. He stands in front of me, his face six inches from mine. His unruly, red beard is flecked with spit around the edges of his mouth. When he talks, he stammers and breathes out a full lung with each word. His teeth are yellow and crooked and his breath stinks. He’s one that I had trouble looking in the eye. He had a seizure disorder. Even when he wasn’t having an episode, he was shaky. His eyes never seemed to fully focus, and he trembled. And at the end of that week, we filled out an evaluation form saying he shouldn’t be at camp.

Let’s go back to G.

Towards the middle of the week, he had a fit about how things were going and refused to participate anymore. He announced to the cabin that this is a place for people who need help, and he didn’t need any help. We had to go find Tyler, who had been his counselor for several years, to talk him into joining in on activities again. Apparently, this happens every year.

I only remember one time where it looked like he was really enjoying himself. We are playing basketball in the field house. His chair is folded up against the wall. It’s dim inside the field house. Corrugated plastic and sheet metal hang from the sides of an iron frame, painted red, that towers above like the ribbing of an overturned ark. Faint light, colored yellow by grimy plastic skylights dotted with dead insects, settles over us.

Nobody is organized into teams. Twenty or so campers dribble and shoot around. Every time a ball strikes the ground it sounds off every wall. Every time one hits a rim, it flies across the building, bouncing lower and lower until it settles into an aimless roll. I chase down those loose balls and shout encouragement with the other counselors. Our job is to make sure the campers are having fun.

I remember G had stayed off to the side for the first ten minutes. Then someone got a ball in his hands, and he carried it over to the foul line. His pear-shaped frame squatted low and held the ball at his ankles. He sprang up, flinging the ball with both arms towards the ceiling. It soared in a high arc before crashing down on the rim, and flying away again. I ran it down while someone else fed him another ball. S joined him, and together they flung them like that for the entire hour. It was the only time I ever saw G smile.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” The reading has come to a merciful end. A few campers clap.

I need to return to something, before I forget.

I’m not a church-goer or a Bible-reader. At least not usually. But I always liked praying at the shrine. The shrine is right next to the chapel. It’s a statue of Mary, painted white, that stands on a raised platform. If I stand close enough, I can see that her cloak is flecked with stars. Granite steps spread wide to the front and sides and sweep into the grass, where the whole camp gathers every night to pray a decade of the Rosary. There’s an altar up on the platform, too, so we can have an outdoor Mass, as long as the weather cooperates. It’s better than having one inside the chapel. When you get a crowd in there, the heat is unbearable.

I said my own prayer at the start of my second summer doing Differently-Abled Week, the summer of 2012, the summer when I met K. I stood at the very edge of the grass on an asphalt track that does a circle around the main field. I asked God to help me remember their humanity and to treat them the way they should be. Or I asked for compassion, or something. I’m having trouble remembering exactly what it was. I do remember thinking that, by praying for something good, I was demonstrating how good I was. But I forgot all of this when campers arrived. Differently-Abled Week leaves me with just enough mental energy to deal with the immediate need of getting campers ready for meals or through activities.

I resented K. He was like G, in that he had these fixations that he wouldn’t let go of. He was obsessed with the walkie-talkies that head staff carried around. Anytime he saw one, he would lurch off after the person carrying it, because he wanted to talk into it. I can remember his voice from when he asked, more clearly than his face. A long, shaking, breathy, stammer. Waahahky Tahaahky. Same with when he asked for coffee at breakfast. “Caahahh-fee. One.” Halfway through the first word, I would be losing patience with him.

He had a seizure one day after rest period. He was standing in the middle of the cabin, babbling while we got our campers ready for swimming. Then he went silent and fell straight back. The back of his head thudded against the floor.

Like I said, I wrote on his eval that he shouldn’t come back. I don’t remember the reasoning I gave. The evaluations are meant to help us figure out if we can adequately meet a camper’s needs. We provide a fair amount of supervision, but campers have to be functional on their own as well, and need to be able to do things like move and dress themselves without help. Anyone in a wheelchair, for example, can’t come to Differently-Abled Week. Guilt can warp our thinking, and memory might just be a mirror for our fears and desires, not a record. I heard later that K doesn’t have seizures more than once a month, and he had two while he was with us. That would be a valid reason for him not to return. But I do not remember knowing that at the time. I don’t know which of us knew that then. And I do know we couldn’t stand him. I remember one of my co-counselors turning over his sheet in the pile and immediately saying, “Oh, absolutely not.” And I didn’t say anything.

The next session was the first regular session. Now all the kids were actually kids. I had one named Will in my cabin. Will was a normal kid, the kind who might come to camp once, and then get forgotten about by the next summer. For about a week I got to know him. He could be weird, but he was tolerable. And then I saw him and couldn’t see him without seeing K. Maybe it was just the height and hair color, but K had left my mind until now, and he suddenly he wouldn’t leave it. Will was K without a seizure disorder. And I was being squeezed by something terrible. “Remember this.” So maybe prayers get answered this way, too.

If you ever spend any time with G, you might notice something he does with his eyes when he’s nagging at you. I saw it during my week with him. Say he was shouting at me to come over and cut up his hot dog. He would have shouted once to get my attention, then two more times as I started to walk over, and then a fourth as I picked up the fork and knife. G’s eyes get really wide when he asks for something. His eyebrows go up, and he pushes his head forward just a little. The feeling I started to get was that he just looked desperate. I don’t know much about his past, but it struck me that there might have been a time in his life where he really did need to ask four times before anyone would cut up his hot dogs.

G doesn’t have any hope of ever not needing help. And the chapel is full of people like that today. In the same pew as G is J. J has Down’s Syndrome. He’s almost as old as G. This summer, he showed up to camp with the added diagnosis of dementia. In a few days, he will be sent home because he has more issues than we’re equipped to deal with. Camp is one of his favorite places. It’s all of these people’s favorite place.

Father begins to pray over the bread and wine. Those of us that know to kneel, kneel. The pews don’t have any kneelers, and the floor is hard. The campers that have jobs often save everything from that job just to come here for a week. Just to play basketball and watch us act out ridiculous stories. They’ll come back summer after summer until they can’t anymore.

So, we play basketball.

Jack Bouchard writes In the Wild, a Catholic newsletter about literature.

Image by Norman Rockwell