Fully Alive

by Timothy Shriver

  It was about 6:00 p.m. when I arrived at Yale New Haven Hospital and asked to see Lamont Young. I was shocked to find out that he wasn’t in intensive care and that there were no family members visiting at the time. I was asked to register with the New Haven Police, since Lamont was a victim of an attempted homicide, and I did so. There were no restrictions on visiting, which surprised me again. But as I approached his room, I could see a cop standing guard at his door, and he checked my identification. I didn’t know if he was there to protect Lamont from further attacks or to investigate visitors for information on the crime. Or maybe, I thought, he’s just here so that when Lamont dies, there will be a law enforcement official to confirm a killing.

  I opened the door quietly, not knowing what to expect. The room was lit by a late-afternoon sun that was pouring in through an uncovered window. At first, I saw only the light. And then I saw an amazing sight: a full human body bound up completely—a leg suspended in the air by slings wrapped thick like a tree; a chest coated in bandages high enough to appear as though pillows were stacked under it; a head fully wrapped in bandages that allowed only small openings for eyes and nose and mouth. Lamont was a still-living mummy with eyes closed and body motionless. As I approached the side of the bed, I began to notice the line of machines connecting him to wires and drugs and began to hear all the beeps and monitors as they kept their ghoulish account of a body in distress.

  “Lamont,” I whispered. “It’s Shriver here. I’m here to tell you I’m so sorry about all this and I’m praying for you, and…” My voice trailed off. The body didn’t move. Nothing seemed to move other than the lines on the machines and the slow pumps moving drugs from their sterile bags into his wound-littered frame. I tried again. “Lamont. I don’t want to tire you, but I want you to know that all of us at Hillhouse are pulling for you. The guys in the ‘L’ [our short for the leadership group] are all here for you.” Nothing. No movement, no sound, no response.

  Then Lamont Young’s eyes opened up just the slightest bit, and believe it or not, I detected the smallest smile on his covered face. And I could see he was trying to move his lips, so I came close to him. Then he whispered with all his energy, “Thanks, Shrives.” And then he drew another labored breath: “Next time,” and another breath: “I’ll use problem solving.”

  It was as though I’d heard a voice from the dead, and I replayed it in my mind to make sure it was real. I whispered, “You’ll use problem solving? Is that what you said, Lamont? Next time, you’ll use problem solving?” He didn’t answer, but he smiled. My eyes teared up and I smiled as I gave myself permission to feel the joy of this wonderful kid and my connection with him, despite the horror of the setting. “Next time? Yeah. Next time, Lamont. Next time you’ll be fine.”

  I smiled and reached out to touch his heavily wrapped arm gently. The conditions couldn’t have been much worse. He was near death and I was once again confronting my inability to make a difference. But though it seems selfish and obtuse to suggest, I remember feeling that our relationship couldn’t have been much stronger. Amid the violence and the physical agony of Lamont Young’s fragile life, he was whispering, hopeful, aware, connected. We were together in our little web of life, joined somehow in our vulnerability and our longing. And though I couldn’t claim to have helped end the carnage of his life or the anger of those who had attacked him, I could claim something precious still: a friend.

  Miraculously, Lamont Young survived seven point-blank gunshot wounds and is now a graduate student at Fordham University. The social development project survived, too. We went citywide to all grade levels with our curriculum, offering teachers as much training as we could. And we created hundreds of after-school activities like the Young Men’s Leadership Group that emphasized everything from outdoor education, to early reading skills, to college visitations, to the arts. We were written about in The New York Times, and in a long exploration of urban poverty by William Finnegan in The New Yorker. The wildly popular book Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, reported on our work as an example of a cutting-edge school reform effort. Together with a small group of collaborators (Eileen Growald, Dan Goleman, Dave Sluyter, Linda Lantieri, and Mark Greenberg), we coined the term “social and emotional learning.” In the years that followed, the field of social and emotional learning entered the mainstream of education reform, proving its value by improving student behavior, teacher satisfaction, and academic performance. With other educators and scholars, we wrote the first book, Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators, describing its components and its power.

  * * *

  It was around this time that the Special Olympics movement caught me off guard and came roaring back into my life. Like hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world, I had been active in my local program in New Haven. I started to see different things than I’d seen before—things that the mystics and Linda and Lamont and Doug and hundreds of other students had awakened in me. When I attended local Special Olympics games, I suddenly began to see the athletes from within.

  I met one athlete who gave me a huge hug at a track event, and then noticed him crying later that day after losing. Instead of dismissing him as awkwardly showy, I was struck by how gifted he was in expressing his inner life. At another local event, I walked by a volunteer who was whispering to another about how silly an athlete was acting. Instead of chiming in, I felt the meanness of the comment and asked her to stop. At the Connecticut Summer Games, I watched a group of athletes mount a medal stand and raise their arms and shout cheers in triumph with only two or three of us standing around to see them, and all of a sudden, I was transfixed by how joyful the athletes were despite the fact that almost no one was watching or seemed to care. I’d been around the athletes and these scenes my whole life, but now the happiness and openness and vulnerability started to break through. The athletes were able to be who they were and say what they felt. They were authentic. For the first time, it occurred to me that I wanted to be like the athletes.

  It was around this time that Linda and I met Loretta Claiborne, a woman with an intellectual disability who turned out to be one of my greatest role models in life.

  * * *

  Loretta Claiborne was born on August 14, 1953, during that dark chapter in history when having a child with an intellectual disability was a matter of shame. Loretta was the fourth of Rita Claiborne’s eight children. Her father was a man named Ben Ritter, but Loretta never met him. He was one of six men who fathered the children of Rita Claiborne, and, like the others, he never lived with her. Loretta only heard Rita describe him as a man who was quiet but treacherous. “He worked in the stone quarry near the Codorese Creek before the war, under the CCC,” she told me. “Somebody tried to cheat him there and he shot him in the neck—old Mr. Mott. Mr. Mott survived—but nobody messed with Ben Ritter.”

  Rita Claiborne met tough with tough. She cleaned houses, worked as a barmaid, and once had a job at the Housing Council. At home, she taught her children the importance of toughness, too. “She was strict,” Loretta said. “She knew we were going to struggle like she struggled. So she was hard on us. She had all her Rita rules, like, ‘You gotta try twice as hard as another kid ’cause of your color.’ And ‘Keep yourself clean. Don’t you leave my house unless you have clean clothes on.’ And ‘Life is about choices and options. What you choose will determine what options you get.’ And ‘Keep your manners. One of these days, you might eat at the White House, and you sure better know how to eat right, because you’re a Claiborne.’”

  Loretta was different from Rita’s other children. In addition to having an intellectual disability, she was born nearly blind and had problems with her feet, which prevented her from walking until she was four. When she reached school age, Rita sent her to Jefferson, the regular public school in their neighborhood of York, Pennsylvania. There was a special-ed school in York, but it was whites only, so little Loretta had to fend for herself in a regular classroom at Jeffer
son. By the age of twelve, she was still trying to complete the second grade. She’d been at school for six years. She was angry and frustrated, much like my aunt Rosemary had been. “By then,” Loretta said, “I’d done nothing but fight with the other kids, get put in the closet by teachers and kept for after-school detentions, then fight some more. One teacher was so mad at me when I couldn’t answer a question that she locked me in the closet for the whole day. What she didn’t know was that the cookies was in that closet, too, so I climbed up on the shelf and ate myself all the cookies I wanted locked in there. And that just made her go off, but I didn’t care. What’s worse than bein’ in a closet? She couldn’t do no worse to me so what did I care. I figured at least I’ll get me the cookies.”

  Social workers, counselors from the local mental health center, and a “Red Cross lady” visited Rita and tried to teach her how to handle her “retarded” child. Rita simply told them: “If God didn’t think I could handle her, God wouldn’t have given me her.”

  Rita lived her life in the belly of the whale, but she had faith. When there was just one too many bullies waiting for Loretta outside, Rita would keep her at home. “She’d braid my hair and pull at my skin real hard and tell me, ‘You gotta have faith in your heart, child. You gotta have God in your heart, otherwise you won’t get by in this world.’”

  When Loretta finally finished the second grade, people from the local mental health center came to test her intelligence. When they told her mother the results, they advised her to institutionalize her daughter. “I didn’t know it was an institution,” said Loretta. “I thought I was going to a private school, and I was excited. Ms. Dorothy next door brought me a box filled with white clothes as a going-away present. I didn’t know anything but that I was getting stuff that my brothers and sisters didn’t have, and I was getting to go to a fancy school. I got new pajamas and everything.”

  On May 18, 1965, a social worker drove Rita and Loretta to the Pennhurst State School and Hospital (earlier known as Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic) in Spring City, Pennsylvania, to put her there for the rest of her life. It was the first time Loretta had been outside of York. “I was just looking out the window of that car with my little white skirt on and my white top and my plaid sweater with pink and blue in it. I was so excited.”

  The hospital had been built in 1903 on a site called Crab Hill. The first group of buildings was completed in 1908, and the original campus layout was finished by 1921. Not much changed between then and the date Loretta arrived in 1965. The buildings were overcrowded, but the school was serving its purpose, which, three years later, a groundbreaking multipart NBC report described this way: “to ship the mentally retarded twenty-five miles out of town to forget them while they decay from neglect.” Pennhurst was a place where people were “deprived of their dignity and self-respect,” with “horrible and almost inhumane conditions.” Twenty-eight hundred children were found “rotting in their cages, cribs, and beds.” The words were shocking—and they could have been used to describe the conditions in dozens of similar institutions at the time.

  When the Claibornes’ social worker pulled up to Pennhurst, Loretta noticed that although it was supposed to be a school, “there were no children walking around anywhere.” A man gave them a tour and pointed to a cottage across a field, and told Rita that was where Loretta would live. From a distance, it looked tranquil. “There was open space everywhere,” said Loretta, “and all the people who met me were nice. I told my mother: ‘I like it here, Rita. I want to go here.’”

  But something about the place seemed wrong to Rita. She brought Loretta home and told the social worker to give her some time to think about her decision.

  A few weeks later, a new social worker, Darrell Nixdorf, visited the Claibornes at home. “Have you decided about sending Loretta to the school?” he asked.

  “I made my decision,” said Rita, looking at her daughter and then back at Nixdorf. “Loretta’s going to be educated right here. I ain’t splittin’ my family up. My kids will stay together.”

  Nixdorf fumed. “We went through all that work, Mrs. Claiborne, and now this? You know Loretta belongs at Pennhurst, and you know it will be a lot better for you if she goes.”

  Rita shook her head. “My kid is staying right here.”

  Loretta never went back to Pennhurst, and she never left her mother until the day Rita died almost thirty years later. At the age of twelve, she was disappointed by her mother’s decision. “It was so bad for me in York at that time and I just wanted to do anything to get out. I thought I wouldn’t get teased out there in the country. Those words and those names and all that ridicule, it was just killing me. I thought anything would be better than how I was living.”

  By the time Loretta reached tenth grade, the school system was experimenting with alternatives to classroom education, and she left school for the last time. They called her program “school-to-work.” Special education suddenly meant getting sent to a “workshop” to do “simple jobs like cutting mats and putting covers on boxes and putting bags of chips and nuts into containers.” It was much less stressful than being in a classroom, but Loretta still had a lot of pent-up aggression. Sometimes she got into fights at the workshop. Sometimes she ran. “I hated getting on the bus to go to the workshop, so I started running to work. I did like to run—that was about the only thing I liked doing. Of course, they wouldn’t let me run on the school track team because I was a ‘retard,’ but that didn’t stop me from running. I’d run with my brother Hank and I’d run home from school and I’d run to the workshop just to get my mind off of things and to be by myself.”

  One day there was an announcement on the workshop’s PA system. “Loretta Claiborne, please come to the office.” Loretta was sure she was in trouble, maybe getting expelled again.

  But when she reached the office, Mr. Lee asked pleasantly: “How are you, Loretta?”

  Loretta was stunned. He had never asked how she was before. She shrugged, then finally asked: “What did I do?”

  Mr. Lee handed her a piece of paper. At the time, she was still functionally illiterate. Not one teacher had yet been able to teach her how to read. “Just take it home to your mother,” he said. When Rita read the mysterious paper, she “mumbled something about something for her retarded kid. And she mumbled that she had her other kids learning drums and running track and in school programs but what was she going to get for me? And she threw the paper onto the refrigerator, and I thought that was the end of it.”

  As it turned out, Mr. Lee was seeing more than Loretta realized. He’d seen her running to the workshop and running all over town, so when he heard about a new sports program that was coming to York for kids with “mental retardation,” he thought of Loretta. It was clear that Loretta was an unhappy child, and that she hated school and didn’t like the workshop much better. But she seemed to like to run, and Mr. Lee decided to try to build on that.

  Loretta forgot all about the mysterious piece of paper that was stuck to her fridge. “Then one Saturday in January comes along and Rita comes into my room at six o’clock in the morning to wake me up, hollering about how I need to go to that program and I better get my butt out of bed and down to the bus to go. I told her I didn’t want to go, but she made me go.

  “So I went down to a church hall to practice running, and I came home and told Rita that I wanted to quit. She turned to me and said, ‘Loretta, you start quitting something today and you’ll be a quitter for the rest of your life. You’re a Claiborne and you’re not quitting.’ So the next Saturday, and the one after that, she made me go.” Saturday after Saturday, Loretta went and she ran: glumly, sullenly, slowly. She didn’t understand the point of the exercise. When her coach asked why she was letting the other kids win the races, she told him bluntly: “Because I don’t care.” She had become more like her mother than she realized: tough, angry, and depressed, without much hope that life would ever be anything but one long st
ruggle. She was also, of course, a teenager.

  Loretta didn’t know it, but the running practices her mother was forcing her to attend were Special Olympics practices. After a few months, Mr. Lee took Loretta aside and told her that she could go to a “games,” if only she would put her fighting hands down and start to use her running feet. “If you try,” he told her, “your feet will take you places.” Loretta behaved herself during the next few practices, and so in the spring of 1971, she was invited to go to Central Middle School for the first Special Olympics games of her life.

  “It was a sunny day. We had opening ceremonies and speeches and a band played for us. When we got there, they gave me a white shirt with black writing on it made by some students and it said Special Olympics on it and I wore it proud! I got to do the standing long jump and the fifty-yard dash—we had yards in those days, not meters. Then I did the three-hundred-yard dash. And then I got a ribbon and I looked around and I loved it. I can remember it like it just happened.” For the first time in her life, people were cheering for her. She was having fun and, for once, getting a moment in the spotlight, something only her brothers and sisters and people on TV usually got. Other people. Something changed in Loretta’s heart that day. “Right there at Central Middle School, something happened. I belonged to something. I knew right there, I was doing something I loved. No place else on earth had ever loved me back. But not anymore. At Special Olympics, I belonged.”

  The something that happened was, in retrospect, nothing mysterious. A woman who’d felt mostly shame and anger arrived at a place where she felt love and belonging. In a way, she didn’t have to do anything to deserve it. She felt it as a gift, just like her white T-shirt. Everything changed, and it’s easy to see why: she found her place in the world. And after a few weeks, it happened again. Mr. Lee announced to the students at the workshop that they were invited to another Special Olympics event. This time, it would be a two-day games. They would be going away for an overnight.