A Son’s Graduation From College Proves a Triumph Over Tragedy

It happened at my stepson’s graduation the other day. I went to get a cup of coffee during the rehearsal and I couldn’t help telling the volunteer mom. “My son’s done it. He suffers from a neurological disability, but he’s graduating with an AA.”

“Neurological disability?”

“Brain damage.”

“You must be very proud,” she said.

At that moment emotion surged up, taking me by surprise. I had to walk out of the grounds and burn my emotions down to a respectable level with the heat of the coffee. Because Frank is one of those people to whom a degree means something. Really means something. Not like mine, which I treated with disdain. I didn’t even bother to go to the ceremony.

But I didn’t have a battle on my hands like Frankie: the four years it has taken him to get this degree have been a crisis-ridden journey back from the ragged edges of society. In 1983 he was 26, living on the beach, eating out of trash bins, speechless, filthy--a street person. How did he get there--this young man whose work had been published in “Stars and Stripes” as a teen-ager and who studied at the Royal College of Music in Dublin, Ireland?

In a way, Frankie is a Vietnam vet. He is suffering from their problems. People don’t think about the scare of war hitting anybody who didn’t actually fight it. Wrong. So wrong.

Frank was 13 when he was in Vietnam visiting his State Department father, tripping to Laos and Bangkok, watching his family disintegrate.

He was one of the thousands of kids and spouses of the war’s support brigade who parked their families in nearby “safe havens” while they carried out tours of duty that often lasted years. More often than not, it was the kids who had it toughest. They lived in alien cultures that they weren’t encouraged to understand; they mixed in a world of rootless expatriates, drugs and R&R; GIs running rampant.

Homecomings were also somewhat like those of the veterans. Except no one heard about the “Sanctuary Kids.” They came back knowing too much, having been exposed to overdoses of poverty, drugs and corruption. Frank seemed to have made it through. He was accepted at a good school in Dublin.

But after his return, we started getting worrying letters from his brothers and sisters. Frankie was becoming difficult, lazy, dirty, strange. Then one day, Frankie landed in jail. They had shaved off his hair because it was so matted. We rang the police. Don’t bother to come, they said with some sympathy, there’s not much you can do.

We came anyway.

We found this shuffling, weather-worn, old character who spoke only in Thai, so others couldn’t understand him. After being released by the police, he gravitated back to the only people who would tolerate him. The homeless, the emotionally ill, the junkies and the transients welcomed him. He went back to sleep on his patch of sand at the beach near the border, never knowing what was wrong with him.

Finally, we got him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed neurological disability. Brain damage. All the laziness, slovenliness, absent-mindedness his friends and relatives had complained about--it had a medical reason. Brain damage.

Frankie’s probably came from a virus, possibly aggravated by childhood fevers and those Bangkok teen-age drugs. The nearest parallel is the trauma of head injury, which leaves many accident victims wondering what happened to a former self that somehow didn’t survive the accident. Frankie’s biggest problem has been facing the loss of that free-hearted, bright kid he knew and liked, before “things started to go wrong.”

It has been a struggle. Nothing heroic. Just tough. Even getting Frankie to join us, take off the filthy clothes, was a struggle. Getting him to talk was a struggle. Getting him to stop talking once he finally started releasing a three-year magma of hate and resentment against the world that had treated him like an animal. That’s still a struggle.

Frank’s life preserver has been school. City College and Mesa College have provided the one means of rediscovering well-worn habits that survived the virus attack on his brain. At the beginning, I would go with Frank to class. We encountered marvelous and tolerant teachers like John Callaghan, who taught us both a whole lot about American history, and judged Frank by his papers and not his appearance. In oral communications, a magical teacher called Kate managed to get Frankie to give speeches in front of class. Miracle!

Soon Frankie didn’t want any more of this stepfather shepherding. It wasn’t that he gathered at circles of friends. But he was tacitly accepted, and he was getting reasonable grades. In psychology he garnered an “A”. Sure, he still made regular visits to his old haunts, but he dressed better and looked better. He had structure in his life. He consistently turned down the facilities for disabled persons, which are good at both City and Mesa. He had no intention of being treated like a ‘half-wit.’ And his suspicion of authority shines undimmed. But he stuck with it and, when necessary, repeated subjects. The toughest was last year, when he had to face an old pre-illness nemesis, algebra. Figures are often the hardest logic to retain for the brain-damaged.

“But what good is all this going to do him?” asked his brother. “Psychology and history aren’t going to earn him any money. Shouldn’t he be trying to get a job?”

The bugbear of the unseen injury still follows Frank. Even those closest to him still don’t understand as they struggle to see a light of self-sufficiency at the end of the tunnel.

An answer of sorts comes from the Mesa College band, showing off its enthusiasm to the sunny collection of moms and dads and spouses and children seated here on the bleachers. As the eucalyptus and pine trees scent the lovely cooling breeze, we watch the graduates parade up one by one and take a little blue book that spells it out in black and white: You are a graduate. And the band blares out, not some stentorian march, but a far jazzier number, a brilliant choice: “You Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

At the command, the students rise and ceremonially swing that tassel on their mortar-boards from right to left. They are graduates. And no one can take that away from them--the children of working families, first-generation immigrants, a cerebral palsy victim who rolls his wheelchair up on the dais, and Frank, marching up in academic swagger to get what is rightfully his. All of them have a story of gargantuan struggles to reach this heart-pumping moment. Frankie is five miles from the beach but, at this instant, light-years away from that unthinkable life. He’s a graduate. City and Mesa colleges may not have given him a ticket to prosperity yet, but they have put back in place the biggest piece missing from the jigsaw: his self-esteem.

“With you,” said Rabbi Aaron Gottesman to Frank, and the 200 other graduates, “everything is possible. Now go out and make this a better world.”

I hope he appreciates that the college he speaks for has already made it a better world. Frankie’s here to prove it.