The human spirit personified
Earlier this year, my sister's oldest son was diagnosed with ALS. When Josh got the news, he was thirty-one years old, with a wife, a four-year-old daughter, and a son who was due later in the year.
For those not familiar, ALS is a debilitating disease wherein one's muscles waste away and it is usually fatal in five years or less. We've seen first hand how quickly it ravages the body--in April Josh was slurring his words a little and having problems picking things up with his left hand. By August, he needed help walking. A few weeks ago when we got together for an early Christmas reunion, he was in a wheelchair.
My sister and her family made the trek from Fort Wayne, IN to my brother's home here in metro Detroit for the reunion. About a half an hour before they were to arrive, Josh's older sister called and told us Josh's Dad would need help getting him and his wheelchair into my brother's house--one person in front of the wheelchair, two on the side, and one in back.
When we heard their car in the driveway, my brother, my son-in-law, and myself dutifully arose and headed outside into a frosty Michigan afternoon to help get Josh in the house. It didn't go quite as smoothly as we might have expected.
My brother-in-law quickly got the wheelchair out of the trunk, locked the wheels, and then lifted Josh out of the passenger seat to a standing position. John pushed the chair up close to Josh, turned him slightly, and then gently brought him down into the seat. We surrounded the wheelchair as instructed while John wheeled him slowly along the sidewalk leading to my brother's front door. There are a couple of long concrete steps prior to the door, and we got Josh up them without much problem. When we got to the doorway, though, the wheelchair tipped a little as we tried to lift it into the house and Josh began to slide out of the chair. As anyone who's ever carried a sleeping child can tell you, dead weight is not easy to maneuver and despite our best efforts, we couldn't stop him and he slid right down onto the concrete.
It's amazing how quickly human reactions can go from being horrified at letting Josh fall to being saddened by his helplessness to the resolve to get him back into the chair. Even more amazing, though, was Josh's reaction: he started giggling.
While the three of us hurried to get him back into the chair as his father steadied it, Josh began laughing harder. Laughter can be awfully contagious and soon we all began laughing, harder and harder until we lost hold of him again and he slid once more onto the concrete. Josh laughed even harder the second time. We took a few seconds until we stopped laughing and as we twisted him to get him back in his wheelchair, he said, "You...need...to...get...my...ass...in...the...seat!" And he began laughing again.
We eventually got him into the house.
Over the course of time, I know that I'm going to get stuck in one of Detroit's myriad rush hour traffic jams that turns a half hour trip home into an hour and a half trip and lose my cool over mising a stoplight or being cut off by some other driver; or that some customer at the store where I work will be rude and I'll be ticked off for hours over some perceived slight; or that a sink pipe will leak or the clothes dryer will finally call it quits and I'll stress over where the money's going to come from to pay for fixing them--but after watching Josh laugh in the face of ALS while lying on a cold concrete step on a wintry Michigan afternoon, I know I really shouldn't let any of life's everyday disappointments bother me at all.
For those wondering, later that day we managed to get Josh back down the steps without incident.