Fully Alive

by Timothy Shriver

  I was puzzled at first by this version of an “enemy.” Not many people would refer to a person with an intellectual challenge as their “enemy.” What was it about them that led Vanier to use that word? I’d always thought of my enemies as those who had done something wrong—deeply wrong to my country, my family, myself. Cruel people were enemies and violent people were enemies, but people like Donal or Ricardo or Ramadhani? They weren’t enemies. Hitler was an enemy.

  But Vanier’s spirituality was focused not only on the “enemies” “out there” in the world but also on the “enemies” within each of us. “The enemy is all the things we fear and disability is a symbol of many enemies. When we see disability, we see the enemy of vulnerability, the enemy of physical illness, the enemy of weakness, and the enemy of despair and death. At L’Arche, we are trying to learn how to love in a way that transforms all of these. In L’Arche, we are welcoming all of you—your brokenness, your victimization, your anger, your fear—so that you can live in a community of intimacy, and gentleness; so you can live, give life, receive life, reveal yourself to others … To learn the love of the enemy is to lay down all arms and say, ‘I am unarmed!’ I fought the most terrible battle—the battle with my enemies and the battle with myself. I have no need of arms anymore. I am no longer afraid. I can live at peace now.”

  Vanier sounded much like Brother David Stendl Rast, who describes the meaning of faith: “Faith … means ultimate trust in the power of God.”

  Who wouldn’t want that kind of faith? No one. Who knows how to get it? That’s tougher. In the fall of the year 2000, I met a Special Olympics athlete who turned out to be the best role model I’ve ever had in the experience of ultimate trust, Daniel Thompson of West Virginia. Our paths first crossed when out of the blue Daniel wrote me a letter after watching The Loretta Claiborne Story on television. “The movie made me feel like I knew where I come from … I was not picked to play any games—or when they had to pick someone, I was the last one picked,” he wrote. “Loretta has been through what a lot of us have been through,” he continued, “and it hurts too. I can only hope that someday we can see the world change and people love us for who we are.”

  I found the combination of pain and vision in Daniel’s letter remarkable, and I wrote back immediately. I asked him about his background, his sports interests, about what had motivated him to write his letter, about what his goals were in life, about his experiences in Special Olympics. But what I was really trying to ask him was what had led him to be hopeful. And how had he learned to frame the hope of the future so clearly and insightfully as being free of fear—a time when “people love us for who we are.”

  Daniel and I exchanged dozens of letters, then hundreds of e-mails, and he became a spokesperson for Special Olympics and a leader in my brother Anthony’s great organization, Best Buddies. Over the years, here’s what I learned about Daniel Thompson’s faith.

  Daniel was born on June 28, 1961, in West Virginia. He was sick right at birth with multiple organ failures and multiple surgeries. Early predictions were ominous, but as he told me years later, “the doctors fixed me up right there at the beginning. Right from the beginning, I surprised people.” He surprised people by surviving, but that didn’t make it easy. He had problems in development, didn’t walk until he was four, struggled with speech into his elementary years, and was in and out of the doctor’s office all the time. But he made it out of diapers and joined peers of the same age in elementary school and proved all the doubters wrong by graduating from high school with those peers. “One teacher did put me in the hallway because I couldn’t understand stuff, but most everyone was good to me. My friends were good kids.”

  In 1999, Daniel was selected by Special Olympics West Virginia to go to the World Games in North Carolina to compete in his favorite sport, bocce. In his own hometown of Bridgeport, West Virginia, he’d won more than ten medals in bocce competitions, and he’d learned the Special Olympics oath (“Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt”) by heart. But he’d also come to his own conclusions about what the words of the oath mean. “‘Let me win’ doesn’t mean let me win. The oath means let me try my best to win. ‘If I cannot win’ doesn’t mean I cannot win. It means to try and be a good sportsman about yourself. And ‘let me be brave in the attempt’ doesn’t just mean let me be brave and attempt. It means let me do what I can and let the outcome be what it may and let me be happy about it. That’s what the oath really means, you see?”

  Time and again, I noticed this beautiful tension in Daniel. On the one hand, he would always emphasize the importance of effort, of doing one’s best and trying hard. He would tell me stories about how he worked hard to learn to read and how much his grandmother had helped him. He told me about his first computer, and how he learned to send e-mails and use an Internet browser. He told me about the time he moved into a group home in a new neighborhood where the residents had organized a petition to keep him out. “I went and gave a speech at the senior center and my speech touched one of the neighbors that was doing the petition and she came to talk to me … Now she’s changed her mind and she came to work for people with disabilities! She was just afraid.” He was a fighter in every sense, focused on his goals, determined to use everything in his power to achieve them, resilient in the face of setbacks.

  But he had learned something else playing bocce, too. One of his favorite stories was about the time one of his opponents, Rachel, a young woman from Lincoln County, beat him out for the bronze medal in a state championship. “I was so happy for her,” he reminded me again and again, because he knew that it was hard for me to understand how a man as tough and determined as he was could be happy about a loss. “I keep trying to tell you, Tim,” he’d say with a playful smile, “she hadn’t won anything for five years and I’d won a gold and a gold and another gold and three silvers and she was about ready to give up. I could tell that she wanted that medal so bad and I already had a bunch.”

  “But, usually,” I said, “winning just makes competitors want to win more.”

  He looked at me as if I was a little child trying to understand the magic of Silly Putty or the mischief of Curious George. “Sure I wanted to win a medal. But you gotta remember the other, Tim. It made me happy to see her winning that medal. I don’t know why people take all those steroids and things just to try to win so hard. All you need is to go out and do the best you can. You don’t need garbage in your system. That won’t make you win nothing. You just need to give it your best. And that day Rachel did better than me and she was so happy and I was just as happy as she was.”

  Daniel Thompson had learned to balance his desire to win with his faith that he didn’t need to win to be happy or fulfilled. Over the years, he became one of my favorite guides in how to try to achieve that balance myself. Like him, I wanted to perform at a high level in my work, but also like him, I wanted to believe that I could trust the outcome regardless of my effort. I became annoying to my friends and family, because I’d forward his e-mails to them so often and suggest they, too, follow his advice. At home, I’d quote Daniel about this or that issue, as he always seemed to have a perspective that combined his razor-sharp instinct about what was important and worthy of effort with his deeply peaceful capacity to accept the outcome of whatever came his way. My brother Anthony asked him to help grow the Best Buddies movement, and he responded by becoming one of the best speakers and advocates for the national Best Buddies gatherings. He’d show up at Anthony’s gala dinners in a tux and a smile and, over and over again, deliver a short talk that would stun the gatherings of stars and tycoons. At one point, my daughter Kathleen made a sign for me to hang over my desk: “Daddy, if you feel stressed out, just repeat, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Daniel.’” Kathleen was tuning in to the way Daniel’s sense of trust and harmony could spread to me almost magically. Years later, she wrote her college application essay in tribute to another athlete, Peter Mullins, who captured this same combination of exuberance and
trust and titled it “Speechless.” Even at eighteen, she was already attuned to the great balancing act of ultimate trust and ultimate effort.

  * * *

  In the spring of 2007, everything changed. Daniel wrote me one of his typically unassuming e-mails updating me on his activities in the local Special Olympics and Best Buddies programs and then added one other item: “I wish I could tell you good news but it’s all bad. I have to go next friday for more surgery … Well the tumor they took out of my bladder two week’s ago I found out yesterday from the doctor was colon cancer … I’m not sure of the outcome yet. I’m putting it in the Lords hands as I told my Bible Study group at church. I know you might be crying one reading this but don’t okay i’ve not cried as of yet and don’t plan on it as I’m like Daniel in the Bible in the lion’s den i have faith in my doctor…”

  The news stunned me. I called him on the phone in the way that people do when they get news that is bad in a big way. “What happened? Are you sure? Do you have a good doctor? What about treatments? There must be something that can be done. How did this happen? You seemed so healthy and fine just a few weeks ago…”

  Daniel answered in simple, calm words. I was fixing; he was being. I tried to claw my way to an alternative ending; he tried to reinforce the truth. “The doctors told me that I was probably doin’ the right thing by not having all the chemos and everything. So we’ll just see how it goes. Right now, I feel okay.” I spoke to his doctor, who reinforced the message: treatment was unlikely to help. The cancer was too advanced. Daniel’s decision made sense. Later I saw the words Daniel had written to his doctor: “I have told Mr. Tim Shriver as well as my church and my family I feel good about my mind not to do any treatments of chemotherapy as I want to be able to enjoy what life i have left like take long walk’s on warm days. And go place’s with out fear of getting sick … I want to live my life till the end feeling good and not being sick all the time. So their you have it…”

  Daniel was dying. He was okay with it. I wasn’t.

  A few weeks later, I drove to West Virginia for the second time to see Daniel. A few years earlier, I’d driven down at his invitation to attend the opening ceremony for the West Virginia Summer Games. We’d marched together in the parade of athletes, and I’d given a short speech to open the games in which I’d quoted Daniel. We were surrounded at those games by the Knights of Columbus, chiefs of police, the president of West Virginia State University, and thousands of athletes, parents, coaches, and volunteers. “Oh, my lands, Tim!” Daniel said over and over again as I told everyone we met about how brilliant he was and what a visionary he was. It was a party and we’d had a blast.

  This time, the drive across western Maryland and over the Appalachians and into the rocky hills of central West Virginia was for a different sort of ceremony.

  Highways hug the earth in West Virginia and wrap themselves around mountains and valleys and rivers as if weightlessly suspended among natural things, plying pathways that sit crisply above the mysterious layers of wood and life and soil and rock below. Trucks rumble by from time to time, but the roads have the quality of an intruder in that part of the world, emerging from one hidden corner of mountain and disappearing beyond another. After four hours on the road, I reached Daniel’s exit and pulled off Interstate 79. I wished I could go on and on above the earth, not having to stop. I looked at the narrow road ahead of me, leading up the side of the hill toward Daniel’s home, and I thought of the poet Seamus Heaney again: “Useless to think you’ll park and capture it / More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass…” I wanted, at that moment, to hurry through.

  I drove a few hundred yards, weaving up a hill and tightening my grip on the wheel—“be careful coming around the corners, Tim. Some of the kids around here don’t remember that there’s two sides of the road!” I counted the driveways and houses as I’d been instructed, eventually turning right onto a dirt driveway, then again, onto a lightly overgrown grassy driveway. I came to a full stop in front of an aluminum-sided single-story ranch house with a nice view of the hill below, a small barn to the left, and nothing much else. Daniel emerged from the house wearing baggy knee-length blue-jean shorts, white socks, a gray sports shirt, and his big, round, tinted glasses. He walked toward the car slowly, steadily, amiably, like Ed Sullivan with a grin. “You made it!”

  I had worried the whole drive about how to act naturally and what to say to Daniel about the dreaded intruder—his cancer. There was no hiding my purpose: I was coming to say goodbye to a dying friend who was young. As much as I wanted to see him, I didn’t want to face him. But within moments, the scene changed. “Let’s go for a ride,” Daniel said, and suddenly Daniel Thompson and I were zooming away on two giant all-terrain vehicles his brother kept in the garage. Daniel had no idea that I loved go karts and mini bikes and riding in the woods. Growing up in Rockville, my dad had allowed me to have a go kart, my older brother Bobby a mini bike, and my younger brothers Mark and Anthony a glorified golf cart known as “the Dune Cat.” When we were kids, we rode these machines as often as life would allow—around our backyard fields with dozens of dogs chasing us, in timed races against one another, into the woods in search of adventures, and, one time, right into the swimming pool that doubled as Camp Shriver’s aquatics venue.

  All of that came back to me that September afternoon as Daniel and I became two little boys revving our engines and riding as fast as we could along dirt roads into the hills. We’d stop as Daniel pointed out childhood landmarks. “See that abandoned shed?” he asked. That’s where he’d escape to, camping out and watching the big red-tailed hawks overhead, the deer all around, and hearing nothing but the sounds of the woods. Then we were off again, across an open field, then careening down the side of the hill in low gear to save the brakes and handle corners better.

  Every image I remember about our ride, I remember as being bright and crisp. The road was rough and in high definition. The ATVs were bright and loud. If Daniel had trained for a lifetime, he couldn’t have done a better job of capturing my full attention to prepare me for our farewell. I could have ridden those ATVs all afternoon, but time was short. “Let’s get something to drink, Tim,” Daniel said. “Come on in and I’ll show you the house. And I want you to see my medals and a lot of things you’re going to like for sure!”

  For the next two hours, we talked and talked. I asked Daniel about his childhood, his many illnesses during infancy, his friends at school, his discovery of Special Olympics, his family, his life. “Did you struggle a lot when you were in school?”

  “Nope. Everyone was good to me except for maybe one or two people in high school. But most of the other kids are from right around here, too, and we grew up together and they could see that I wasn’t so good in my studies but that didn’t bother nobody.”

  “Do you remember being in the hospital a lot?”

  “Nope. That was mostly when I was little and my mother told me about it but I don’t remember none of it. From all I could tell, the doctors just kept taking me in and patching me up. One time it was my kidney and another time it was my bladder and another time it was my brain and they told my parents that I wouldn’t live past five but here I am and none of that never bothered me. I can’t even remember any of it!”

  “What about working? What’s it been like trying to get a good job?”

  “Yessir, I’ve had good jobs! I worked at Walmart for a while, but I left after a year because I couldn’t handle the pressure. That’s the only time I really needed money. A lot of the workers at Walmart, they even gave me money and then I got my social security and I went back to the store and I went around to the employees and tried to give them back the money they had loaned me, because I kept a record—but they didn’t want back their money, which was totally amazing, you know.”

  “You’ve never had much money, but somehow it doesn’t seem to bother you. Is that right?”

  “I’ve had plent
y. You gotta look out for others, too, when it comes to money. Look at Leona Helmsley. She said to one of her maids one time by accident, she said, ‘Oh, I don’t have to pay taxes. Only little people do.’ She was just focused on money. Like Donald Trump. I’m positive that one of these days, it’s going to catch up to him. If I could, I’d say, ‘Donald, you may have a life of fame. You may have a life that you think is good and stylish. But, Donald, I want you to think of being in a dark, dark space, nothing around you, no telephones, no cell phones, no iPods, no computer, no nothing, no friends. Nobody ever comes to visit you. You have nothing. You are just all alone, all by yourself in a little dark corner and there’s a chair, and that’s it. That’s what living with disabilities is like.

  “‘And then all of a sudden, you wake up and you got mail and you got a friend and you got people who want to play with you. Then life gets all full. So therefore, Donald, I feel you should donate and help and give your time and effort. You’ll feel better and you’ll feel happier and you could even get a tax deduction, too!’”

  The mention of the dark spaces brought images to mind that I didn’t expect. As he started to talk about dark spaces, I thought first of the quiet of contemplative prayer and the tranquility of being drawn inward and toward the big emptiness. But as he spoke, I realized he was speaking of that other dark space—the space of nothingness where nothingness is not an open door but a brick wall, a prison of aloneness that I’d heard so many people mention but not with Daniel’s raw directness. “No nothing” was not a description of an inner peace but rather of an inner despair. I realized that beneath Daniel’s guileless positivity lay a history of loneliness and isolation. I thought of the terrible poetry of the prophet Isaiah as he describes the suffering servant: “He was despised and rejected by people. He was a person of sorrows, familiar with suffering. He was despised like one from whom people turn their faces, and we didn’t consider him to be worth anything” (Isaiah 53:3). I was struck by how powerfully that image from the Hebrew scripture matched Daniel’s reverie about the dark spaces. He, too, had been a man of sorrows. He, too, had been a man from whom others hide their faces. Daniel’s faith had not come without cost. He knew the meaning of “all alone.”