The Legacy of Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier shaking hands with one of the core members

 of L’Arche Daybreak, John Smeltzer, in October 2009.

(Photo by Warren Pot/Creative Commons)

It was my privilege to learn about Jean Vanier, his witness and his writings when I came to work at the St. Andrew's Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama, which drew it's inspiration form Vanier's L'Arche Community. Jean Vanier died this week (May 7) in Paris at the age of 90. You can read about him here.

The following essay was first posted in December of 2012 when I was telling the story of some of my encounters at St. Andrews. This interview with Francis Walter gives us a look at how he came to start a ministry for people with developmental disabilities.

The Reverend Francis Walter Talks about Life, Community, Justice and Disability at the St. Andrew's Foundation

My blog series, “Wednesdays with Dorothy” tells of the life of a woman who came to the St. Andrew’s Foundation as part of her transition from institutional life to community life. It is her story in her own words. I have also written some about my story involving the St. Andrew’s Foundation (you can see those essays here and here). My story, however, as well as Dorothy’s story at the St. Andrew’s Foundation would not have happened without Francis Walter’s story.

The St. Andrew’s Foundation was established under the leadership of the Reverend Francis Walter in 1973. He had previously been director of the Selma Interreligous Project during the civil rights struggle and in that role, among other things, had sponsored the Freedom Quilting Bee which was a cooperative that enabled poor black women to raise money for their impoverished region. (You can read about that project here.)

Francis hired me to work at the group homes in 1984. Since those days he went on to become rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. He currently lives in retirement with his wife, Faye, at their home in Sewanee, Tennessee. I was able to catch up with Francis recently by telephone to talk with him about the early days of the St. Andrew’s Foundation. The following is his recollection of how it all began.

Francis Walter during the days
of the Selma Project
(Birmingham Library Archives photo)

The first thing that happened was that the Selma Interreligious Project at the end of our era had a good bit of foundation money. We had two lawyers that worked for us – they later formed their law firm and we were their clients. Jack Drake was one of them, he still practices law in Birmingham and he’s a fascinating guy. He became sort of a sub-lawyer in the lawsuit that was Wyatt vs. Stickney. He assisted. So there was kind of a vote of the Selma Project. We said, well that certainly would help a lot of poor people. We said, “Sure, you can take that on as a project until you start getting paid anything for it, the Selma Project will pay for it.” So we began to hear about it, then the lawsuit was won.  The Psychology Department at the University of Alabama was very helpful – they were on the side of the angels. There were people at the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation who were bitterly opposed to any improvement – they  didn’t like the lawsuit, though there were other people [at the Mental Health Department] who secretly did [agree with the lawsuit] and we got to know them. 

The First Group Home in Alabama

So the University of Alabama Psychology Department thought that they might become the primary agent for de-institutionalization. Ray Fowler was the head of the Psychology Department. He and Jack and I would get together and talk now and then. One of the things we thought of was to have an office in each county and let people – like in Gee’s Bend – let people have one mentally handicapped person in each household. They could be paid a small amount of money and there would be a bus that would pick people up and take them to a center where they could improve their skills. It would bring some money to the poorest people in Alabama and they were also very loving people and most of them were black – and so we talked about that. But then the forces behind implementing Wyatt v. Stickney said we needed to have a group home, so the Selma Interreligious Project bought a house in Tuscaloosa right next door. We hired some people to be house parents. We had read Normalization and knew something about things like that and it was a nice old house. 

I had a little Volkswagen and I set out to Partlow – I had never been there before – to pick up two guys and take them down, show them the house, and ask if they would like to live there. This was going to be the first one, the grand experiment. We decided to name it Wyatt House after Ricky Wyatt. That was kind of a slap in the face of the Alabama Department of Mental Retardation because they were going to fund it, part of it, anyway. 

I had never been around identified mentally handicapped people. These two guys were in their fifties – one of them, I remember, was named Guy Wheatley. I was a little apprehensive, but after we were halfway there, it was only a couple of miles, I realized, well they’re just like me, they’re not any different. I remember I said, “What do you do Mr. Wheatley?” he said “I’m an inside plumber.”  I said, what’s an inside plumber? He said “I live at Partlow and I’m a plumber” There’s a plumbing company that does all the plumbing work and some of us belong to it.”  In other words there was an ordinary plumbing company and they would come on campus [at Partlow] and they would pick up these guys who they taught to become plumbers and they all worked together, but the inside plumbers never got paid anything. Wheatley said “I’d like to live in a group home, and the plumbing company told me they would hire me. If I’m not an inside plumber anymore, I could be an outside plumber and get paid.”  I thought, Well, that’s one example of how these people were taken advantage of.

So the other guy said, “I work in the canteen that sells soda pop and candy.” I asked him what he would like to do if he gets out. He said, “I don’t want to lose my job.  I’d like to come back to work at Partlow.” I asked him why, he said “They take state holidays – I’d have more holidays if I worked for them.”

They both moved in to the group home and we were the very first group home in Tuscaloosa. The Selma Project managed it, and it was right next door.  These were pretty high functioning people who first came out of [of the institution]. I think we had about eight residents there at Wyatt House.  So that was when I got interested in the work.

The Second Group Home

Then my wife and I got divorced, I resigned from the Selma Project and needed a job.  Ray Fowler said, “You could work with us. The state wants us to start a group home in Montgomery.  We’ve gotta do it in a big hurry and then we’ll take politicians through it to show them how nice it works – that they should continue to fund the de-institutionalization of Partlow and Bryce.”

So there were three of us on this task force. We didn’t have any time, we had to do it all at once, and it was really not very good. I just moved down to Montgomery, rented a hotel room and started reading the newspapers and talking to people. Within a few days we found this house that we could rent. Then I began to look for staff members. We were working from the idea that we could operate a group home from Tuscaloosa that was in Montgomery. So we had house parents and other workers who could relieve them. Well, then all of a sudden one of the relief workers doesn’t show up. They [the house parents] telephoned and said they were mad, that they were just going to walk out and leave all these people [the group home residents]. It was not a well thought out plan but it was the second group home [that was set up for residents from Partlow].

Things Fall into Place for the St. Andrew’s Foundation

I heard that the state was willing to talk to churches and non-profits about operating group homes. I knew that the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama had inherited these three houses on Birmingham’s Southside.  A woman had wanted a religious community to move to Birmingham and live there. She wanted St. Andrew’s Church to sponsor them. That didn’t work out, so she decided to just leave the property to the diocese. I went to the bishop and told him about how they could be group homes. Maurice Branscomb, the rector at St. Andrew’s said it would be great, the parish would love to sponsor it, and the residents would be welcome to worship here. So one thing led to another.

 Three houses in a row came to be the Women's Group Home (left), the Intermediate Group Home (partially pictured at the center) and the Men's Group Home (right)

Then a really generous thing happened that was so implausible for a political agency to do it. A lot of women worked as social workers in the Department of Mental Health. I was talking to one of these women there about this possibility.  She said, “That would be great, but we won’t have the money to do it until October.” She then said, “Here’s what we’ll do – we’ll hire you as a consultant for the Mental Retardation Department.” I asked her what I would do. She said I would just wait until it was funded and then I would go on the payroll of the Mental Retardation Department.  So I moved into the house in the neighborhood which I later bought.  An elderly woman lived there and initially I was going to move into the upstairs portion, but she died. The owner of the house was a member of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. She told me to just go ahead and move in, and until we got things funded, she wouldn’t charge any rent.

It was perfect, because I had been reading about the problems that arise when you try to have a group home in a neighborhood.  Living there, I was able to join the Neighborhood Association and talk to people beforehand.  So the Diocese gave the go ahead to use the property for group homes. I hired Jim and Cathy. They were hired before we had any residents. We would do things like mow the lawns and clean the houses. We went to talk to mentally handicapped people and got ready to fund the thing.

The Road to a New Life

Something else had happened back before what I’ve been talking about here. Right after the divorce, I was really at a low point. We had sold our house and I moved into a room at the Selma Project House in Tuscaloosa. I knew the Trinitarian Sisters, a Roman Catholic order. Their mission was to work in the very poorest of parishes.  I had come to know them through civil rights work. One of them called me up. She knew what had happened to me and she said, “I want you to drive to Mobile and you are going to experience something that will change your life.”

I was ready to do things like that, so I said, “Okay, what is it?”

She said, “We are going to show a movie about a community for mentally handicapped people in France. “

“Where will it be?” I asked

“Are you familiar with the Allen Memorial Hospital in Mobile?”

“Yes, I was born there.”

“Well, after we show the movie, they’re going to tear it down.”

I thought, “Boy that is really synchronicity. The Holy Spirit is telling me to go. Here my life has been turned upside down.  Then I get this call to go and have a life-changing experience in the building in which I was born and then they’re going to tear it down the next day. “

It was a movie about the L’Arche Community. Then Jean Vanier [the founder of L’Arche] was invited by the Roman Catholic bishop in Birmingham to come to lead a retreat at Camp Tekawitha. So I got myself invited to it. It was three or four days. He lectured; there were a lot of mentally handicapped people there. It was very moving. Vanier is an incredible human being to be around. I saw how he related to mentally handicapped people, and I got to hear what his theories were.  That really also set me on the path.

The life of Vanier is just amazing. His father was the governor-general of Canada, which is like being the president. His mother was a university professor. He was on the road to being an academic at some university. He was in Europe and he had this experience of meeting two mentally retarded men under a bridge – that’s where they were living. He said to them, “How would you like to live with me? We’ll just get a house.” He decided to turn his back on a brilliant academic career and start this community. The little town was called Trosly-Breuil in France.

Learning from the L’Arche Community

After we got the staff members hired [at the St. Andrew’s Foundation], even before we got the first residents we got some money to send some of our staff members to a L’Arche Community in Toronto.  Those buildings there were designed according to normalization and L’Arche principles. The houses in Toronto, I can’t remember the name of the community up there, it was mostly Roman Catholic, so they were not using government funds. The houses were decorated with lots of beautiful colors. The center of each house was a large dining room and a big table where everybody sat.  All of the mentally retarded people had their own napkin rings and cloth napkins and were very fancy. When guests came, they had paper napkins. The guests were expected to prepare at least one meal for the house in which they were staying. Everybody had a wonderful time at the table, talking and joking.  All of these people, the staff members, were just living on a token salary – that was how they operated – so they would stay there two or three years.  That was a great experience, though I knew we couldn’t have a L’Arche community. We didn’t have the money to start one in Birmingham, but one got started in Mobile as a result of that retreat that was held in Birmingham.

So that’s how the St. Andrew’s Foundation got started. John Prince [who was a priest as well as an attorney] drew up our papers. He said, “Let’s call it a foundation, then we won’t be using any terms that refer to mental disability, and it will be linked to the church.” It was stipulated that parishioners would make up a certain percentage of the board.  We also had the space at the church to have our offices. So I read Normalization and I read materials that came from L’Arche.  We often said, Harry and I, that we never had any trouble relating to our clients. All the trouble we had was relating Mental Retardation Department of the State of Alabama. I have to say that one of the things that made the St. Andrew’s Foundation work was Harry Hamilton – he is an exceptional human being. I’ve been re-reading The Canterbury Tales, and there is that line, “Gladly would he teach and gladly would he learn.” That’s Harry.

Some of Our First Residents

We had a resident, a black woman named Earline. She died while she was a resident. We organized a funeral for her. If we had done nothing, her body would have been taken back to Partlow and placed in a grave that had a concrete marker with a number on it.  The whole staff said, “We’re not going to let that happen.” It was a wonderful event.  Very moving. I wrote a paper about it for an organization we belonged to of group homes for mentally retarded people. The title of the paper was “Earline.” I thought it was very illustrative of how the St. Andrew’s Foundation operated.  

Francis Walter in 1990 as
rector of  St Andrew's Church

I’ll tell you one story about Earline. Earline always came to church at St. Andrews. She would sit in the back pew. When the celebrant [at the altar] would hold his or her hands up in the orans position, Earline would always do that. It was not the first time that I had thought this, but as far as the bodily parts of the liturgy that involved moving around like that, the people who were mentally handicapped, because they weren’t so uptight, they were more open to doing things like that. So Earline would always hold her arms up like that, and I thought, well she would fit in a second or third century church because everybody held their hands up. So when the priest held his hands up so would Earline, and I always really liked that. Then at the end of the service when the deacon said, “Let us go forth in peace,” and the response would be “Thanks be to God,” Earline would really shout out “THANK YOU GOD!” Everyone else would of course be saying the quote the right way, and I thought you know she is full of the right spirit, and to hell with the order of the words.

Buford was another one of the residents who like Dorothy and Geraldine moved through our group homes and was ready for his own apartment. We had made the arrangements and he was getting ready to move. He was over in the office with Harry and me and we told him, “we’ll keep track of you, Buford, we’ll still be around, but is there anything you would like for us to do before you move?” He said, “Burn my file!” I thought, you know we could get into some trouble for doing that. If I do it, I’m not going to leave anything. Then I thought, well the hell with it – so we get in trouble, that’s what he wants. And it was so powerful.  We went out into the parking lot at St. Andrew’s.  I got some kerosene and candles and Harry, Buford and I burned that sucker up. Nobody ever said a word about it at the Mental Health Department – they didn’t know anything about it. It would never have occurred to me with my I.Q. to do that, but Buford knew exactly what he wanted. 

And the Work Grew

(The first expansion of the work of the St. Andrew’s Foundation came as a result of one of the residents. Cecil Cruise lived in one of the group homes and had befriended a young man in the community who in turn made the St. Andrew’s Foundation the beneficiary in his life insurance policy. I had heard the story when I worked at St. Andrew’s and I asked Francis to tell the story again.)

Joe Haney was a young man who was a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He became a member of St. Andrew’s Church.  He was an acolyte, and Cecil [a resident at the group home] was also an acolyte, so Cecil befriended him.  Joe had cystic fibrosis, but nobody thought not to have incense [during the service].  This guy would just be choking and Cecil would say to him, “There’s nothing wrong with you – you’re going to be alright. You’ll get over this.” And Cecil would slap him on the back and encourage him. Well in time he died.  It bowled us over – here we get a notice from an attorney that Joe had left $50,000 to the St. Andrew’s Foundation. It was from an insurance policy. The only reason he had it was that to be a student at UAB, the students automatically got an insurance policy. I don’t think any insurance company would have given him a policy. He had reached more than the average age of a person with severe cystic fibrosis.

The apartment building that became
the Joe Haney House

I called his mother up and said to her, “I don’t feel very good about this, how do you feel?” and she said “That’s what he wanted to do. He wanted that money to go to the St. Andrew’s Foundation.” Then she told me about how Cecil had encouraged him and befriended him.  He didn’t specify how the money be used, but there was some kind of federal program, I guess the word you would use today is leverage, we could take that $50,000 and we got a loan at an incredibly low interest rate. So with that money we bought the apartment building and fixed it up.

(The apartment building was dedicated to Joe Haney with a plaque in his memory. There were four units in that apartment building and thus some of the residents, including Cecil, were able to move to another level of independence and still have supervision on the premises. It also allowed the St. Andrew’s Foundation to serve a larger number of clients.)

~    ~    ~    ~    ~    ~

Where Sorrow and Beauty Dwell

My conversation with Father Walter reminded me of how fortunate I was that my life intersected with St. Andrew’s Church and the St. Andrew’s Foundation. It was there that I came to know more about what it means to be human. It was in that setting that we sought to recognize the worth of every individual, and to help those with disabilities live normally in the community. It was in that unique community at St. Andrew’s that all of us – residents, staff and volunteers alike – joined in an endeavor to celebrate the rhythms of life together.  

There were some trying days, some times of frustration. There were times when in a single moment tears were elicited that came from a deep core where sorrow and beauty dwell together. It was real life. The kind of real life many of us for some reason try to avoid. We think we could save our life by avoiding those things that touch upon our own sorrow and brokenness, only to realize that “whosoever shall seek to save one's life, shall lose it.”

Time and Change

Many things change with time. The old houses where the St. Andrew’s Foundation began were bought by the hospital on the same block as it expanded its facilities. New homes were built on the same street. Also two new houses were acquired in the neighborhood to facilitate further independence for some of the residents.

Today, the work that was begun at the St. Andrew’s Foundation continues by way of the Jefferson County Association for Retarded Citizens. The ARC oversees operations of the group homes and supervised apartments.  In addition to the ARC, other places in town such as the United Cerebral Palsy Center of Greater Birmingham, Workshops, Inc., and the Glenwood Autism and Behavioral Health Center provide training and opportunity for a number of people. The need for services for people with disabilities has not diminished, and thankfully there are people and organizations who are trying to fill that need.

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* Photo Credit: All photos by Charles Kinnaird except where otherwise noted


For more information:

• “L'Arche: a Community of Brokenness and beauty,” A radio broadcast on American Public Media with Krista Trippett. You can hear an interview with Jean Vanier, or read the transcript at http://www.onbeing.org/program/larche-community-brokenness-and-beauty/116
• Learn more about the Association for Retarded Citizens, also known as “The Arc” at http://www.thearc.org/page.aspx?pid=2335
• Learn about The United Cerebral Palsy Center of Greater Birmingham at http://ucpbham.com/
• Information on the Glenwood Autism and Behavioral Health Center can be found at http://glenwood.org/
• Find out about things happening at Workshops, Inc. at http://www.workshopsinc.org/

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Flashback: An Ordinary Life

[While I am working on another project, I have been re-posting some of my favorite past essays. This one was written around 2004, several years before I began blogging. This post appeared on my blog on November 9, 2010. I would later write more on this subject in my essay, Form and Substance: How a Sonnet Saved My Life, which was also featured in the current "Flashback" series.]

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

"People who live with disabilities have something very important to say about what it means to be human"


I found myself getting a bit teary-eyed last Sunday during the closing hymn celebrating All Saints Sunday. The hymn was “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.” In the old 1940 Episcopal hymn book it was listed under “Hymns for Children.” I knew it had been a favorite of my friend, Meg Parker. Hearing the song made me think of days past, and so I decided to post this essay I wrote several years ago after Meg’s death.



An Ordinary Life
by Charles Kinnaird

Meg Parker lived an ordinary life, which was quite an accomplishment given the obstacles that she faced. She lived in an apartment and had a daily routine with friends and colleagues. Meg had loves and conflicts. She knew joys and sorrows, gains and losses. The fact that she lived the life that she did is a tribute to her family, to the community at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, and it is especially a tribute to Meg herself.

Meg Parker lived with developmental disabilities and a seizure disorder. St. Andrew's Foundation provided group homes for adults with mental retardation. It was there that Meg was taught daily living skills and was able to acquire some measure of independence. Eventually, she was able to move into an apartment with a roommate. There, with supervision, she was able to live a normal life with a normal routine. She was also able to move from a sheltered workshop to her own job in the community. She had a good life, and she was determined to enjoy life in spite of the difficulties.

At her funeral, the priest, Father Marc Burnett, said just the right things to commemorate the life she had lived before that final seizure "shook her from this life into the next." As I sat there listening to the eulogy, I could not help thinking about the day, eighteen years earlier, when I first met Meg Parker

I first visited St. Andrew's Church in March of 1984. I was a Baptist seminary graduate trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Meg was the first one to welcome me to the parish that day. Little did I know how my life would change after that encounter in 1984. Within the year, I had joined the Episcopal Church and had begun working at St. Andrew's Foundation (which was later named St. Andrew's Place). The parish and the group homes would become central to my life for the next twelve years. It was Meg Parker and others at the group homes who caused me to re-evaluate my worldview and to reassess my ideas about what things are important in living a meaningful life. I came to see the importance of ordinary things: a simple meal shared, a conversation about little things, an outing in the park.

So much happened during those years. I was able to immerse myself in Anglo-Catholic liturgy, social service, and progressive theology, all of which were a break from my Baptist roots. It was also there that I met my wife and our daughter was born. All of these things were changes for the better. I shudder to think how life might have been otherwise.

My life took a dramatic turn on that day back in 1984, and Meg Parker's welcoming of a stranger played no little part in its turning. It was at St. Andrew's that I came to realize that people who live with disabilities have something very important to say about what it means to be human. How we respond to people with disabilities says something very important about who we are as human beings. When I look at the ordinary life that Meg lived, I see it as a sign of hope. In the final analysis, is that not what we all want – an ordinary life? All of us achieve that ordinary life the same way that Meg did, only with help from our friends.


[Note: The group homes and supervised apartments of St. Andrew's Place are now under the auspices of The ARC of Jefferson County]

Flashback: Form and Substance: How a Sonnet Saved My Life

[While I am working on another project, I am re-posting some of my favorite essays. This post originally appeared on August 22, 2011.]

The Sonnet

The sonnet is the most restrictive of

Poetic forms. A scheme is strictly set

Dictating poet's rhyme and rhythm, yet

He chooses it for lofty thoughts of love,

Admiring noble deeds, or saintly stuff.

Indeed, the sonnet always seems to let

Transcendence have its way so as to get

A sense of freedom. Thus we see it prove

To be the highest, freest form to whet

A true Poetic. Often when I see

The bounds within which I must find my way,

(The cold collective spreads its mindless net

And freedom seems to fade) I wish to be

A living sonnet soaring through the day.

CLK                                       2/82

The sonnet, like so many aspects of society, provides rules, structure and boundaries. We can find comfort in those boundaries we see in society. Boundaries give definition to what is expected and provide security in our roles. On the other hand, boundaries can be restricting and oppressive. We have common metaphors that speak to this paradox: “keep your hand on the plow,” “stay on track” are just as familiar as “he was chomping at the bit,” or “pulling at the traces.” Boundaries indeed offer guidance, but sometimes one must slip the traces or jump the tracks. I recently read some words from Spanish poet Antonio Machado which speak poignantly and profoundly about how we make our own way to find our true path in life:

Why should we call

these accidental furrows roads?

Everyone who moves on

walks like Jesus, on the sea. [1]

The sonnet above is one that I wrote when I was 28 years old. I offer it as an example of how one can be awakened by one’s own poem. At the time, I was teaching English at Hong Kong Baptist College on a two-year assignment with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board. I had graduated from seminary and had plans to go into ministry upon return to the States. During my first year back in the U.S., I was in the middle of a chaplaincy training program at Montclair Baptist Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. One evening I was re-reading the sonnet that I had written two years before. For some reason, I imagined myself as a 68-year-old man and a young man was reading the sonnet. The young man asked me if I ever learned how to be a living sonnet. The only honest answer I could give in that imaginary situation was, “No. I never did.”

It was at that moment that I realized I needed to get out from where I was at the time. Toward the end of my chaplaincy training, I was offered the opportunity to apply for an opening in the chaplain residency program at the hospital. To the director’s surprise, I never applied for the position.

Finding New Directions

“Where will you go from here?” the Pastoral Care director asked. I had no clear answer, except that I knew I had to go away from where I was at that moment. The next year proved to be a formative year. I left the Baptists and found St. Andrew's Episcopal Church where there was a commitment to high liturgy and social service. While there, I found employment at St. Andrew’s Foundation working with adults with developmental disabilities in group home settings. The overarching ideal at St. Andrew’s Foundation was “normalization,” meaning that we would allow each person to live as normal a life as possible, with normal routines rather than being defined by their disability.

St. Andrew's Church

The home where I worked was a couple of blocks away from St. Andrew’s Church.  In those days, the bell in the church steeple would sound out the hours. The liturgical hours (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline) were designated times of prayer throughout the day. This was a form that I was unaccustomed to, having grown up Baptist. While I worked with clients at the group home, even though those liturgical hours were unfamiliar, it was meaningful to hear the bells sound during the day. It reminded me to stop, if only briefly, to acknowledge that I was working within a larger context of meaning.

Even more than the liturgical hours in the background, the group home residents themselves gave my life a centering. More than teaching and certainly more than professional ministry, my work now seemed like real life. Teaching and ministry are both wonderful and needed professions, but my own strengths and abilities did not fully align with the tasks in either milieu. I was therefore not finding life within those structures.  At St. Andrew’s Foundation I sat on front porches and in living rooms of those group homes visiting and talking with residents who were limited in many ways, but they helped me to see more clearly what real life is about. All manner of assumptions were dispelled during those days. We were all learning each day how to better find our way in the world. They needed help with shopping, banking, household management, job training, and managing the conflict that arises just by living with other people. They were learning to have a home of their own, and I felt like I was finally home.

I would later recount, "It was at St. Andrew's that I came to realize that people who live with disabilities have something very important to say about what it means to be human. How we respond to people with disabilities says something very important about who we are as human beings." [2]
 

Nothing is constant, however. After several years of rewarding work at St. Andrew’s Foundation, I was also starting a family and needing to broaden my possibilities. To that end, I went back to my old alma mater for a degree in Nursing. My first job in the Nursing field was as a psychiatric nurse at the same hospital where I had once been a chaplain. I remember walking across the hospital grounds one evening, recalling how I had made that same walk years before as a chaplain. Back then I was thinking, “I don’t belong here.” That night, however, as I walked the grounds as a nurse, I said to myself, “This is exactly where I belong!”

Writing New Avenues and Looking Inward

I continue to make a living in healthcare, and I also continue to write. The point of sharing my sonnet is to show how the process of writing can help us to know who we really are, at least that has been true for me. My writing has taken the form of daily journals, personal letters, dream journals, essays, and poetry. The poetry that I have written over the years often has served as a kind of spiritual diary, recording where I was, what I was thinking, and how I was feeling at the time. Sometimes the writing surprises me by opening up new windows and new avenues. Sometimes the writing, as with this sonnet, helps me to see a bit more clearly how to live more congruently with my inner self and ideals.

For all who have an interest in writing, I say, by all means write! Don’t worry about whether it is “good enough.” That sonnet that I wrote all those years ago is certainly no Shakespeare or Dante, but it contained a true observation that allowed me to take a probing look within myself. Make sure that what you write is your true voice. You will probably learn more about yourself, and the writing might even save your life.

                                                                                                               Charles Kinnaird

_____

1.  From I Never Wanted Fame, by Antonio Machado (translated by Robert Bly), Ally Press (limited edition) 1979.
2. From "An Ordinary Life" at http://notdarkyet-commentary.blogspot.com/2010/11/ordinary-life.html

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You may be interested in reading these related posts:

• An Ordinary Life
• Any Tree That Falls: why creative people must create

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Monday Music: Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (André Rieu)

All are welcome, and everyone belongs! Sometimes Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is powerful because we are all "broken hallelujahs" celebrating life in the midst of joys as well as sorrows. Sometimes the song is powerful because we are all included, as André Rieu demonstrates here by including people with developmental disabilities in the orchestra. A beautiful sight in The Netherlands city of  Maastricht as all of the people in the audience join in as well, singing and swaying to the music.

Remembering Dorothy One Year Later

An Epilogue to Wednesdays with Dorothy

"A Year to the Day"

There may not be a specific time needed to complete grief work, but we often think in terms of one year to come to terms with our loss.  Within that year, of course, there is an initial time of intense grief followed by the ebb and flow of varying degrees of emotion. There are periods of intentional remembering and then there are moments in which a memory may be evoked by an event, a place, a conversation, or a simple object such as a cup of coffee.  Sometimes it is a seemingly coincidental encounter.

Just this week I was in a meeting at the hospital where I work. One of the supervisors at the hospital approached me and asked, “Didn’t you have a friend that you visited on our unit in Palliative Care?”

“Yes,” I answered, and then told him a little bit about Dorothy.

“Now I remember,” he said to me, “I read her story when she was on the unit. I was so moved by what that dear lady had been through. I remember she had a lot of friends from her church who came to visit. How was it that you knew her?”

I recounted to him how I had been with the St. Andrew’s Foundation for 12 years before I moved into the nursing field, and how it was during those years that I came to know Dorothy. I went on to tell him of my regular meetings with Dorothy to record her life story. That conversation and that chance encounter took place on April 16, exactly one year after Dorothy’s death.

A Therapeutic Endeavor

When I first began “Wednesdays with Dorothy” my purpose was to share her story in her own words. I knew I would share a little bit each week. Beyond that, I had no plan as to how long the series would take. I would simply share a little each week for as long as it took to tell her whole story. I had no idea at the time that I would bring the series to a close right on the heels of the anniversary of her death.

It was like an inner prompting. I knew that it was time to start sharing her story on my blog and so it was that on August 15, 2012, “Wednesdays with Dorothy” was launched. Being able to wrap it all up exactly a year after her memorial service (April 18, 2012) is an added confirmation that it all fell into place just as it was supposed to.

A Witness to the Realities of Social Services

It has certainly been therapeutic for me to recount Dorothy’s life on these pages. I hope it has been meaningful to those who have followed along each week.  My first intention was to share the voice of one who had witnessed an important time in our history so that others could hear from a different perspective.  Dorothy’s testimony gives us a view of how our society has handled mental health treatment over the years.  There were the years in which the mentally ill and the handicapped were warehoused behind the closed doors of institutions. We were able to hear, for example, Dorothy’s eye-witness account of what life was like inside Partlow State School and Hospital. Her account was much different from the glowing reports that Dr. William Partlow gave in public during the very time that Dorothy was institutionalized.

Dorothy’s life also coincided with the move toward de-institutionalization brought about by the Wyatt vs. Stickney decision in the federal courts. We were able to hear what she thought of the process of moving from the institution to the community. We heard what she liked and what she did not like about that transition. Above all, we were left with no doubt about the fact that Dorothy herself longed to be free from institutional life and loved her experience of having her own apartment in the community.

There were times when “the system” failed her. First there was the institutional life that took advantage of her higher functioning abilities within that population and kept her confined without the opportunity to realize other possibilities. There was the brief jubilation of freedom from institutional life as the State Mental Health Department was forced to comply with the federal court order to move residents to greater levels of independence. There was also the reality, in some ways as harsh as institutional life, that there were simply not enough resources in the community to serve everyone with mental health needs.  If Dorothy had had to rely solely on mental health services where case workers are stretched with incredible case loads, her life in the community would not have been so successful. 

Dorothy managed to keep an informal support group of friends in the community and at her church who helped her as she patched together her own system of services. The latter part of her life further symbolized the shortages of social services offered.  She was moved out of the division of Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities with the State Mental Health Department when she “tested out” of the mental retardation classification. The good news was that she had some case management services that allowed her to continue to live in her apartment. The bad news was that when it looked as though she would need more services, it meant getting onto a waiting list at a time when she needed immediate help. Fortunately for Dorothy, she had her network of friends to see her through during her final days.  Any parent of an adult child with disabilities can tell you that waiting lists are long, and services offered are few. We have gone from neglecting the needs of patients warehoused in the institution to unfortunate shortages of services in the community.

A Personal Milestone

My remembrances of Dorothy have also given me opportunity to recall my own life-changing encounters. When I began my work at the St. Andrew’s Foundation, it was a definite turning point in my life. My work in the group homes was a time to re-focus and to see things from an entirely different perspective. It enabled me to get off of a dissonant vocational track and to spend some time at a slower pace. I was able to learn some important lessons about life from people who live with disabilities.

I have told people that my job as Program Director at the St. Andrew’s Foundation was the best job I ever had – it was the best job in the world as far as I was concerned. I was in the middle of the life of St. Andrew’s parish, I was involved in meaningful social ministry, and I was working with people with whom there is no “putting on airs” – you have to be totally real and down-to-earth.  I grieved when the time came for me to move on with a nursing career, but I knew at the time that I needed to make the move into another field in healthcare.  Times change and the job that I saw as the best in the world does not even exist today since the the supervision of the group homes has been passed to the ARC of Jefferson County.   The St. Andrew’s Foundation served its purpose in its time, and I am proud to have been a part of it.

With my continuing friendship with Dorothy, I was able to stay in touch with that life that I had learned at the St. Andrew’s Foundation.  Dorothy and I shared that memory of life at the group homes, and we shared an on-going friendship.

"All Things Must Pass"

I don’t like the term “closure.” I’m not sure we do ourselves any good with the notion that we can close one chapter or event in our lives and keep it in some kind of box while we move on. I believe we widen our circle as we go along, dispensing with nothing, affirming everything that has occurred.  At the same time, I realize that everything changes. There is an impermanence to things that we must learn to accept. By telling the story of Dorothy Faye Burdette in “Wednesdays with Dorothy,” I have been able to let some other people know about her life and the things she endured as a person with disabilities. I have been able to celebrate the ministry of the St. Andrew’s Foundation. I have also been able to affirm a period in my own life that saw a restructuring in my personal philosophy of living. I will not close the lid on any of that, I will just acknowledge the passing of an era and look forward to what lies ahead. Though a life has come to an end, the ministry of St. Andrew's Foundation has passed the baton to others, a personal career has long since gone and new experiences have come into the field; I will try to hold the memories dear while I continue to widen the circle.  

____________

For Further Reading:

• Wednesdays with Dorothy: A Blog Series
• An Ordinary Life
• Form and Substance: How a Sonnet Changed My Life
• An Interview with Francis Walter

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Frustrations in Life

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A view looking eastward down the street where Dorothy lived

   Another view of Dorothy's street                                         Dorothy's apartment building (left foreground)

                           

Dorothy spent a lot of her time out and about when I first came to know her. She walked all around her neighborhood of Southside, including the Five-Points-South area. She could be seen walking down the sidewalk carrying her big canvas purse over her shoulder.  Once when she was visiting in my office, getting her checkbook out of that canvas bag of hers so we could help her with some of her bills, she mentioned that she always carried a brick in the bottom of her bag. She said that was in case she needed to defend herself while she was out walking around town. I don't know if she ever had to swing that brick-in-a-bag, but it obviously gave her some sense of security. In my conversations with Dorothy years later, some of her stories illustrated why she had felt the need to keep a brick in her bag. 

Things do not always go our way in life. Most of us know this, yet we can still get frustrated when things don’t happen the way we would like for them to. Living with disabilities and trying to make it on one’s own certainly can lead to all kinds of frustrations. One day in our conversations Dorothy shared a few of those frustrating incidents.

A rose in bloom

“I used to go out and walk to most places I needed to go. One time I went with Cliff – I never will forget it, he lived out at Bluff Park somewhere. We were supposed to go to Walmart or somewhere. He kind of got mad with me when I said we would go to Walmart. He said he wasn’t going nowhere. What had happened, he backed into something and knocked something off the back of his car. He said he was taking me on home. I got real, real angry and I said, ‘Cliff, let me out and I’ll walk home from here – just let me out on the freeway somewhere.’ He wouldn’t do it, he brought me on home. I came on in the apartment and I was mad, I had a brown pocketbook and I slung it all the way from the front back to the kitchen, I was so angry.”

“Another time, at Chris’s Restaurant, I got mad and threw a salt shaker across the room. Elmus had said he was going to meet me up there and he never did. Somebody said something to me. They said that nobody was coming. Well. I didn’t take it the right way – I guess I took things too serious – and I got mad and threw the salt shaker. It landed farther than I intended. The man that ran the restaurant told me to get up and go back home. It was a long time before I could go back over there. When I threw the salt shaker, I didn’t realize how hard I did throw it.”

“One time I was walking out there by the church. There was some little boy out there and I was trying to call Cliff on the pay telephone. Elmus come over here half-drunk and he was aggravating me and I didn’t feel good. I told him to get his butt out of here and go on back home. That boy came up here and tried to keep me from talking on the telephone and I shoved him down. I don’t remember who it was now. He came up when I was on the pay phone. I was angry and I shoved him down, He got up and left and I never did see him no more.”

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Next time we will hear about more dangers that Dorothy encountered, including some unscrupulous con artists.

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Freedom to Shop

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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One of the buildings at Partlow State School (photo by Naaman Fletcher)

Finding Appropriate Care

At the time of the Wyatt v. Stickney case, there were “over 3,000 residents living in overcrowded and inhumane conditions who had no legal alternative.”(1) Many of those residents were rather high functioning mildly retarded people who were even used by the mental health system to help run the institution. As Dorothy has recounted, they were called upon to help with the care of many of the severely handicapped residents and were enlisted to do the washing, cleaning, and cooking alongside employees and always without pay. Those at the "Boy's Colony" did the agricultural work that brought in income to the institution.(2)  It was these residents who surely knew that they were being denied options in life that they wanted to take part in.

On the other hand there were the severely handicapped residents who were warehoused and abused at the hands of poorly trained employees supervising the “high-grade” residents who participated in the care of the “low-grade” residents. In those days, parents of severely handicapped children were routinely advised by medical professionals that institutional care was the best option for their children, not realizing the detrimental warehousing conditions of those very institutions.

When I was Program Director at the St. Andrew’s Foundation, part of my duties included gathering information about new residents coming into our group homes. I will never forget the conversations I had with parents, almost always mothers, about their adult children with developmental disabilities. On one occasion, a mother described how she had been assured by the doctor that Partlow was the right place for her eight-year-old son, and how she watched as a staff person took her son’s hand and lead him away on the day he was admitted. My own daughter was around five years old at the time. I thought of how I could not bear to think of placing her, with her normal coping skills in some institution away from home, yet so many who lacked those very skills, were routinely institutionalized “for their own good.” We cannot minimize the hardships faced by parents of children with developmental disabilities. As a society we must offer resources to help. We must not, however, resort to insufficient means of caring for those children and their families.

Adventures in Shopping

Dorothy Burdette loved to shop, perhaps more than any other activity. When talking about her experiences at Partlow State School in juxtaposition to her life outside the institution, shopping was often the big comparison in her mind. At Partlow there was no freedom to leave the campus, no freedom to make decisions, no freedom to shop. Here are some of Dorothy’s adventures in shopping when she was finally able to leave the institution.

Dorothy Burdette

“Robbie worked at the group home. He made me mad one time. He said, ‘You owe me a cup of coffee, and I gave you a ten dollar bill.’ I said, ‘I didn’t ask for no money from you Robbie and furthermore, I don’t owe you no coffee! You owe me some!’ And later on he did get me a cup of coffee.

“What happened was, he took me to get something for my birthday, and he wouldn’t let me get it. It made me mad with him.  It turned out I didn’t have enough money – I was ten dollars short. We ended up going to Woolworth’s and getting some coffee.”

 “[When I needed to go shopping] I used to go downtown by myself half the time. I remember one time I went with Jim when he worked there. I got some of them week day panties and some of those soup labels – they used to make them like what came on Campbell’s Soup cans- and I got some of them. Cathy said they were for little bitty young ‘uns and I didn’t have any sense getting things that were not big enough for me. She told me I didn’t know how to buy the right size. It made me mad, and I told her, she didn’t know what I didn’t have, and I’d get what I wanted to and it wasn’t none of her business.”

 “I liked to make my own decisions about what I bought. When I was at Partlow, we couldn’t go out shopping, and we couldn’t make decisions about the clothes we wore or the things we bought. For our clothes, they would order cloth for the sewing room, then they would sew it into clothes and give ‘em to us. They had different staff that would come in and sew.”

 “Once I was at the group home, I went several times to shop and Cathy would always get mad. She’d say, ‘You always go off and leave us – you don’t wait for us.’ I’d get my cart and away I’d go. She said, ‘Can’t nobody keep up with you, you don’t wait on nobody.’ Usually they would take about two or three of us at a time when we went out shopping. I always went with who I wanted to. I didn’t much care for Cathy, she had a hot temper.”

“I liked the food better [at the group home] that at Partlow, and I liked that I could go with the group home staff to do the grocery shopping.”

“I remember my first Christmas in Birmingham. In the group home, we would go out to do Christmas shopping and to look at all the Christmas lights.”

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References cited:

1. The Legacy of Wyatt , http://www.mncdd.org/parallels2/one/video/wyatt.html
2. Penley, Gary, Della Raye: A Girl Who Grew Up in Hell and Emerged Whole (2002). Pelican Publishing, p. 71.

Photographs:

• The photo from Partlow State School was taken by Naaman Fletcher years after the institution was closed down. Naaman's photos are featured on his blog What's Left of Birmingham at http://leftbirmingham.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html .
• The photo of Dorothy was taken about the time she left Partlow. It was one she kept on her dresser in her apartment.

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