Behind the Masks

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

This Sunday morning when I went to church, the Madrigals from our local high school were seated on the stand. Fully masked, they sang “Angels We Have Heard on High” as part of our Christmas celebration. Since I work in a school district, I know the gravity of conversations which were had before school began about whether or not choir classes could even be held. School districts took very seriously the CDC warnings about COVID 19 being spread through uncovered mouth and nose exposure. Despite the difficulties inherent in their situation and though I couldn’t see a single face, the joy in the voices of the choir rang out across the chapel.

It reminded me of my Uncle Tommy. He was born the year before me in a time when there was only limited knowledge about the genetic complications which resulted in Down Syndrome. When the doctor talked to my grandparents about the difficulty of raising such a child and recommended a local residence facility, my grandfather–a man of very few words–said only, “Well, the Lord knew where to send him.”

Tommy was named after my grandmother’s youngest brother who died on English soil training to become an RAF pilot before the United States entered WWII. Doctors told my grandparents he’d never be potty trained or learn to read or write. They were wrong. He had a prodigious memory and an unquenchable determination. He knew the full name and the birth date of every member of the family, even the great grandchildren when they came along. He knew in-depth baseball statistics and the route to and from everywhere he had ever been. After he developed enough coordination to hold and manipulate a pencil, he began copying the Book of Mormon, a few verses every day—for most of his life. Though he didn’t understand the words he wrote, he could read most of them aloud, and he knew they spoke of the Christ his parents had taught him about. His faith was unerring.

Tommy loved to swim. When Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics in the early 60’s, Tommy won medals every year in the water. He was stronger than any but the toughest of my cousins, and we all knew that while Tommy loved a good joke, he didn’t like people who made fun of him or anyone else, for that matter. He let us know when we had crossed the line. So, we learned not to. It was a powerful lesson that colored the way my siblings, my cousins, and I have seen those around us for all of our lives.

When ever my grandparents came to visit my parents, Tommy was always with them. He and my brother Newell were usually relegated to a hide-a-bed and a roll-a-way in the family room. It was an old house. The previous owner had added that room himself; it wasn’t tied into either the furnace or the air conditioning. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

One winter night—when my grandparents came to Albuquerque for a visit while I was in college at BYU, it was so cold that the wall-mounted gas heater couldn’t keep up; the family left a low fire burning in the fireplace. Tommy woke up in the middle of the night choking. My brother, 17 at the time, heard him whimpering. Then they both fell back to sleep.

When Newell tells the story, he says he awoke sometime later with a start and sat straight up. It felt as though someone had shaken his shoulder, but there was no one there. Newell couldn’t breathe. Something was terribly wrong. Crawling from his bed to where Tommy was sleeping, he was unable to rouse him. He remembers somehow lifting Tommy’s considerable dead weight onto his back and dragging them both up the three stairs and the door into the main part of the house. He knew he was passing out as he pounded on the door and yelled for my mother.

When my mother found he and Tommy, they were in the front yard lying in the snow. Newell has no memory of how they got there. But they were both still breathing when the ambulance arrived. A fire department investigation concluded that the room wasn’t properly ventilated, and the fire absorbed all the oxygen in the room as the temperature dropped. They both should have died.

Perhaps someone did nudge Newell’s shoulder enough to wake him; he can’t be sure. But I am certain that of all the people Newell and I have ever known, Tommy deserved heavenly intervention. When my grandmother died and the Bishop came to console him, Tommy said with the slurred language most Down Syndrome children share, “Bishop, my mudder has gone to live in Heaven with my father.” For Tommy, there were no complicated theological or philosophical complexities–just a statement of fact. It was the Bishop who left weeping.

People who didn’t know him were often wary of my Uncle Tommy’s short, thick stature and his outside face. But like the Madrigals behind their masks in church today, the music of his faith swelled around him and gave us all a glimpse of the Heaven just beyond our reach that Tommy could clearly see.