THE
POWER OF MY POWERLESS BROTHER
by
Christopher De Vinck
(Condensed
in Reader's Digest from The Wall
Street Journal)
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In the house where I grew
up, my brother was on his back in his bed for almost 33 years, in the same
corner of his room, under the same window, beside the same yellow walls.
Oliver was blind and mute. His legs were twisted. He didn’t have the strength to lift his head of the
intelligence to learn anything.
Today I am an English
teacher, and each time I introduce my class to The Miracle Worker, a play about
the blind and deaf Helen Keller, I tell my students about Oliver. Once a
boy raised his hand and said, “Oh, Mr. de Vinck,
you mean he was a vegetable.” I stammered for a few seconds. My
family and I fed Oliver. We changed his diapers, bathed him, tickled his chest to make him laugh. We listened to
him laugh as we watched television downstairs. We listened to him as he
rocked his arms up and down to make the bed squeak. We listened to him
cough in the middle of the night. "Well, I guess you could call him
a vegetable,” I finally said. “I
called him Oliver, my brother. You would have liked him.”
When my mother was
pregnant with Oliver, she was overcome by fumes from a leaking coal-burning
stove. My father pulled her outside, where she revived quickly. On
April 20, 1947, Oliver was born. A healthy-looking,
plump, beautiful boy. A few months later, my mother brought him to
a window and held him in the sunlight. Oliver looked directly into the
sun and my mother realized that her baby was blind. My parents learned,
with the passing months, that blindness was only part of the problem. The
doctor at
We’d wrap a box of baby cereal for Oliver
at Christmas and place it under the tree. We’d
pat his head with a damp cloth in the middle of a July heat wave. His
baptismal certificate hung on the wall above his head. A bishop came to
the house and confirmed him.
Even now, five years after
his death, Oliver remains the weakest, most helpless human being I ever met,
and yet he was one of the most powerful. He could do absolutely nothing
except breathe, sleep and eat; yet he was responsible for love, courage and insight.
When I was small my mother
would say, “Isn’t it wonderful that you can
see?” Once she said, “When you go to
heaven, Oliver will run to you and embrace you. And he will say, ‘Thank you.’” I remember, too,
that my mother explained how we were blessed with Oliver in ways that were not
clear to her at first.
So often
parents are faced with the problem of a severely retarded child who is also
hyperactive, demanding or wild, who needs constant care. So many people have little
choice but to place their child in an institution. We were fortunate that
Oliver didn’t need us to be in his room all
day. He never knew what his condition was. We were blessed with his
presence, a true presence of peace.
When I was in my early 20s
I met a girl and fell in love. After a few months I brought her home to
meet my family. When my mother went to the kitchen to prepare dinner, I
asked the girl, “Would you like to see Oliver?”
“No,” she answered.
Soon after, I met
Roe and brought her home to meet my family. When it was time for me to
feed Oliver, I sheepishly asked Roe if she’d
like to see him. “Sure,” she said. I
sat at Oliver’s bedside and gave him his first
spoonful, his second. “Can I do that?”
Roe asked with ease, with freedom, with compassion. So I gave her the
bowl and she fed Oliver.
The
power of the powerless. Which woman would you marry? Today
Roe and I have three children.