The Least of These

In my native tongue (Danish) the biblical phrase “Love your neighbor” is translated “Love your ‘next’”. As a child I always took the phrase as a call to love the next person that crosses your path, the next person you happen to run into during the day. That ain’t easy…

Recently in the pursuit of services for my son Ben, who will be 18 in September, I had occasion to call on an advocate from the ARC (Association of Retarded Citizens). She asked me to meet her at one of the many places where she works, in a homeless food kitchen, and she asked me to have lunch with her and her clients before we would sit down and discuss the specific issues that I was having with procuring state services for my soon adult son.

Ben and I arrived, and joined the food line and piled our plates with tortillas, beans, lettuce, and salsa, and sat down to enjoy lunch with about 8 other people. Our host, the advocate, was busy with a client in her office.

Her clients were very friendly, and they all introduced themselves. An elderly man, with long stringy greasy hair and a shirt that looked like he had been under the hood of a car most of the morning, served Ben and me tall glasses of iced tea. The others let us go first as honored guests. Others handed us napkins and showed us where to sit.

Ben fit right in, apart from his always being slightly overdressed with his usual tie and button up shirt. He sat down comfortably and ate, unconcerned with whom he was with, what they looked like, smelled, like, or how they ate.  

I on the other hand felt self-conscious about my over-dressed attire (I dress well for work and for doctor’s appointments and lawyers appointments, and I had seriously misjudged what the occasion required). But more to the point, I did not know what to say to these people. My presence in the room was big enough (compared to what I imagine their normal camaraderie was like) to put a damper on their spirits, putting them at a loss for how to resume normal conversation—or so, at least, it felt to me, and I was sorry for it.

This particular group consisted eight to ten morbidly obese persons.  All of them were 40 or older. Apart from the obesity, another tell-tale sign of poverty was the bad teeth and missing teeth in every mouth that grinned at me. But what took me a while to figure out was why their conversation (to which I was a mute bystander) seemed so juvenile to me.

Awkward in the face of my intrusion, they offered all their attention and conversation to a pug (owned by the secretary in the front office) who skittered from chair to chair licking food off people’s forks—forks, which the people afterwards would put back in their mouths as they continued eating.

These people laughed, they talked with food in their mouths, they belched loudly, unhampered by the middle class do’s and don’ts that constrain most of my behaviors at table.  It finally occurred to me that every single one of them had a low IQ –in other words, they were retarded—not as low, perhaps, as Ben, but 60- 80 or below is my guess.

Interestingly enough while Ben is about IQ 45, his table manners and ways of eating, conditioned by persistent middle-class table training, were incredibly refined compared to the rest of our company. Elbows at your sides, use both knife and fork, take small bites … you know the drill. (No, I am not patting myself on the back for this small feat in my child training. In light of these people, their needs, and the over all situation, who CARES if they belch at the table?)

After lunch, when I got back with the advocate to address Ben’s case, I asked her about Ben and his future. You see, the state of Colorado has a waiting list for funding for day care for adults with mental disabilities once they leave the public school system. Obviously, an adult with developmental disabilities needs to be somewhere while his parents go to work. I asked her what happens to adults with developmental disabilities, whose parents cannot or will not take care of them (while they are on the Colorado waiting list to get this day care funding). Nothing, she answered. Absolutely nothing. They are on their own.

Those persons I ate lunch with are homeless retarded persons, clients of this advocate who is trying to do what she can for them, while they are on the waiting list to get state funds so they can be taken care of properly. Likely they had parents who took care of them but have since died, and there is nobody else to take care of them.

I asked her what would happen to Ben if neither of his parents wanted to take care of him after he turned 18.  The answer was precisely what I dreaded. He would also be on his own until his place on the waiting list came up.

It is unfathomable to me to leave someone with the IQ of 45 in the street!!

Colorado, the advocate said, is 48^th lowest in the nation in the quality of care it offers its developmentally disabled adult community. (Much could be said, but I shall leave your own thoughts to ponder the weakest of the weak in our society).

[There is good news, however, and I must end on this note to do justice to my state. Governor Hickenlooper has spearheaded a movement to get rid of this waiting list with some legislation that just was passed in April. Colorado counties hope to get rid of their waiting lists for the developmentally disabled in the next year or so J. I was told that likely (not guaranteed but likely) Ben will be off the waiting list within a year of his 19^th birthday if all goes as they think it will. – We are blessed for Ben to turn 18 at this happy juncture and not 5 years ago.]

I drove home from this meeting deep in thought. Ben sat next to me waving his pencil-baton to the beat of Mozart – we were going back to our comfortable middle class existence by means of our air-conditioned car.

With what tremendous grief and worry, must the dying mothers or fathers of those precious people have drawn their final breaths--knowing that there was nobody to take care of their adult disabled children.