This column is about the many lessons I have learned from the residents and the staff as I have observed them through the years. The approximately 135 residents who live at The Virginia Home are physically handicapped adults who will live out their lives there. They have cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, spina bifida, spinal cord injuries and various unique conditions that render them permanently disabled. Most, unlike my daughter, are not mentally handicapped. Many came from other, more institutional-like facilities, and many come from families who have abandoned them.

Many—I don’t know the percentage—come from families who are like ours, which made the difficult decision to bring their family members to The Virginia Home and do their best to visit often and remain the most important part of their lives. The home is a place of happiness, hope and service.
 
Here are a few of the principles the residents of The Virginia Home have taught me in the past 11 years:

Physical bodies are not as significant as the spirits they house.

I believe that sometime eternities ago I heard an announcement that offered a “big prize” for all of mortal life and I went and got in line. Then when there was no turning back, I realized the announcement was for “big thighs.” Oh well. Keep that in mind while I recall a Rachel Ray show the other day when a woman received some kind of free collagen injections for her hands, for which the plastic surgeon usually charged $1,500. Her life was supposedly difficult because she was ashamed of her thin-skinned hands with gnarly veins. The TV camera zoomed in on her hands, which could have been mine. I’ve always been aware my hands are a phlebotomist’s dream-come-true, and I used to complain about mine too.

Then at The Virginia Home I met the resident who was a thalidomide baby (Google that if you don’t know what it is) and has no arms or legs. She has tiny stubs at her shoulders that manipulate her electric wheelchair. She is happy and involved in her community, however. Another resident has arms and hands, but his hands are totally contracted back at the wrists against his forearms. I didn’t think about the effect the conditions of his hands had on his life until I asked him to play a game with us one day and he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t enjoy games much because of my hands.” Yet, he is always interested in whatever is going on and has an observation about most everything you can imagine.

They are just two of the residents who would be glad to have legs like mine that work and walk and hands that make me independent and able to fulfill my responsibilities in life. They have taught me to be grateful for my physical body, however imperfect it might look.

Everyone who tries can find a way to make the world better.

I can’t remember exactly who it was, but I went through the lobby one day where the residents gather and saw one resident with his hand hooked through the wheelchair of another, laboriously and with difficulty advancing his wheelchair along with his feet while pulling the other one wheelchair. “Do you need help?” I asked, knowing I could move them much more quickly. “No, we’re heading for the dining room,” he said. “I’m just trying to help cut down on the congestion.” It was about 45 minutes before they had to be in the dining room, and I’m sure it took them that long to make the trip across the room, but he contributed to the good of the world the only way he knew how. One resident slowly delivers the mail up and down the hall each day. Another teaches a Sunday School class. Still another resident who earned an art history degree before her disease narrowed her life and locked her tiny body, delighted many residents by sketching their pictures until her death this year.  

“The song of the righteous is a prayer unto me.”

I love music and am constantly moved emotionally by the beauty of hymns and scared music, but I am never brought to tears as quickly as I am when I visit on Sundays and overhear the residents singing in either a church or Sunday School service. Many of them cannot talk intelligibly enough for others to understand, but when they open their mouths and lend their voices the best they know how to “Amazing Grace,” “How Great Thou Art” or any other hymn, I know their voices ascend up to the God they are praising, who is aware of the circumstances under which they came to earth. If these most humble of God’s children, consigned to wheelchairs, most with the scars of many surgeries, some living with constant pain, others with no families, can open their mouths and hearts and praise God for His goodness to them, cannot I face my problems with a heart filled with humility and gratitude?

Take advantage of every chance to be kind.

A resident used to live on my daughter’s hallway who spent most of her time sitting across from the nurses station. She never moved any part of her body but her head that I could see. Her legs were stretched out on soft pads in front of her and her arms on her tray with her hands twisted out from her wrists. She drooled constantly, and most of the time her mouth hung open. Yet her eyes were bright, and the aides and nurses seemed to always know what she was trying to communicate.

When she was upset, however, her cries came from deep within her soul. One day, as my mother and I got ready to get on the elevator to leave, she started wailing from the bottom of her heart with one of the most wrenching sounds I had ever heard. No one was around, so I walked over to her and stroked her arms, talking to her and telling her that everything was going to be OK. I told her I would go and get her favorite CNA. She finally calmed down, and I left.
 
She died that week in her sleep. When I heard the news, I was so grateful I had followed the prompting I felt to talk to her and try to soothe her. If I had not done that, I would forever have felt that I had missed a chance to “do it unto the least of one of these my brethren.”

Everyone is different and special.

When Dawn first went to The Virginia Home, I found the experience of being around so many people in wheelchairs and with so many physical problems overwhelming. It was hard to admit to myself that I had a child who fit in there, even though she had been in a wheelchair for years. I would walk through the lobby where the residents would call out, asking questions or needing a foot moved or a push down the hall, and my mind was turned to the crowds who would press around the Savior, always needing and asking. Was it just a crowd to Him, or did He look each in the eye and remember them from an eternity before?

As I gradually got to know everyone, I learned in my heart and not just my mind that everyone was an individual with their own personalities.  One resident loves Cokes, and another is always looking for someone to play a game of cards with her. One resident always answers “Fantastic!” when you ask him how he is, and one is jealous of any other female resident who gets too close to her boyfriend. One resident always want to  know when we are taking Dawn home and says she wishes she had a mother to love her.

Love endures.

It is easy for some to fault families for putting their family members someplace other than their home. Sincere members of my ward criticized me for doing it. But as I have watched families faithfully visit their family members at The Virginia Home, week after week, month after month, and year after year, I have learned that love endures, even when families face the necessity of being unable to take care of their family member all the time. One husband spends every day with his wife and brings the dog on Sunday to sit on his wife’s wheelchair tray, then goes home to spend the nights by himself.  One father drives three hours both ways every week to spend a day with his son, often helping with other residents while he is there. Brothers and sisters visit their brothers and sisters and bring their elderly parents to visit the children they have cared for all their lives. They come dragging loads of laundry and bags of McDonalds. And when necessary, they sleep on uncomfortable cots beside hospital beds for as long as it takes.