Kenny came down the stairs from his room Friday afternoon and asked me if I had change for a ten. In his hands he held fourteen dollars. I handed over my two fives as he gave me his ten. That’s when he asked the question that tore my heart to a thousand broken pieces.
“I haven’t had time to go shopping for you guys [i.e., my wife, my son and daughter, and I] for Christmas,” he said. “You think anyone will mind if I just gave cash for presents? I know a lot of people don’t like to receive money as a present, but this is all I have.”
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Kenny came into our lives back in 2009. My wife, suffering from brain damage caused by the chemotherapy for her pancreatic cancer in 2006 (check out the link for a description of her post-cancer cognitive losses ) was at her lowest ebb, physically, emotionally and spiritually. A friend of ours convinced her to make-over the inside of our home, tearing down the original, but ugly wall paper the previous owner had put up and re-pain all the interior walls. In additio, she decided to replace all the old fixtures and toilets in the bathrooms. Most significantly, she agreed to throw away the mass of papers, boxes and useless items that she’d accumulated over the years that made our house a candidate for the reality show, Hoarders.
The goal was to get rid of all the clutter, paint each room in the house in bright new colors that she choose for herself, add new plumbing fixtures, upgrade our lighting fixtures, and hang new drapes and window blinds, etc. The idea behind this plan was that it would help her deal with the losses to her brain function, and the resulting depression and anxiety that came with it, by giving her life a sense of purpose. It was a big project, and for a woman who had always prized herself on being ‘productive’ this was just what she needed to feel good about her new life.
Kenny worked part-time for the woman we hired to help my wife with her home makeover. He was a big bear of a man in his late twenties, with tattoos, piercings and long disheveled hair dyed the most flamboyant colors. Despite his size and strange appearance he was a gentle soul, who laughed easily and was always willing to do whatever was asked of him. That usually meant he did all the dirty, grimy grunt work and little things that made it possible to finish what started as a three month project but eventually turned into one that lasted nearly a year. As a result, all of us got to know more about him.
Kenny had long had difficulty holding a down a steady job. He has a bad case of OCD and other psychological issues. Personally I’m not convinced that his OCD is his only mental disorder. However, as he had no health insurance for years, and only recently obtained Medicaid, he has never been properly evaluated by a decent psychiatrist. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness as a child, he was abandoned by his parents at 17 when he came out to them as gay after the church’s conversion techniques failed.
He never completed high school, and has lived hand to mouth ever since. What we didn’t know at the time we first met him was that he’d become a heroin addict to deal with the extreme anxiety that accompanied his OCD symptoms. We also did not learn right away that he’d been sexually abused by his father and other men of his church as a young boy, a trauma that he’s never really gotten over.
Our family, and especially my wife, soon became fast friends with Kenny, and he was often invited for dinner at our home, even after the work on our home was completed. He got on famously with my daughter — they both share large, outsized personalities — and the two of them bonded over card game competitions.
Eventually, however, we began to to see less of him as he moved out of our city to go live with his aunt an hour and a half away to a small town in western New York state near the Canadian border. She resided near his grandparents, and was literally the only relative willing to take him in after he was required to enter rehab in lieu of prison for possession of a controlled substance.
He was placed in an out patient program for substance abusers in the county where she lives, began taking Suboxone to address his substance abuse problem, and a variety of other psychoactive medications for his mental health issues, including Xanax, to be taken when his anxiety escalated into full blown panic attacks, which happened on an all too frequent basis. It wasn’t a perfect living arrangement for him. His aunt’s husband never wanted him there, but as they were taking care of their 18 month old grandson while their son and his wife were in prison for meth dealing, they needed all the help they could get, and he fit that role perfectly.
Unfortunately, one night in May, 2012, his symptoms became so severe that he descended into a brief dissociative fugue state, and began roaming through their home in the middle of the night, opening every drawer and cabinet and taking everything out looking for god knows what. He still has no recollection of doing any of those things. His own opinion is that an over the counter medication he took for a cold interacted badly with his prescribed meds, but we’ll never know for certain why he acted the way he did that night.
However, this incident was all the justification his aunt’s husband needed to get rid of him once and for all. The cops were called, and Kenny was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric unit at a facility in a rural hospital more than an hour from where hhis aunt lived. It was a terrifying experience for him that triggered nightmares for weeks afterwards.
The blood testing done at that facility while he was institutionalized found no drugs in his system other than his prescribed medications, and after 72 hours he was released. His relatives refused to come get him. He was stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no money and only the clothes he was wearing the night the cops came and removed him from his aunt’s home.
Alone and in a panic, he called my wife, who had remained in touch with him. He asked if she could come pick him up, and she did. Obviously, we didn’t want to just turn him loose on his own to become another homeless person. Kenny was our friend. She brought him to our house for the night. However, we all knew he had no place to go. After some discussion among all of us, including my kids (my son then 24 and my daughter 17 and about to graduate high school), we agreed to take him in for a little while until he could get back on his feet.
A little while turned into months and then the months turned into years. We had no idea when we took Kenny into our home that his mental health problems were so severe, or that he would require so much help. My wife found a way to get him transferred into the drug rehab program in our county, obtain food stamps and helped him apply for permanent disabilty benefits from the Social Security system, an application that is still pending.
Since we couldn’t find a doctor willing to prescribe the prescription medications he needed, an old high school friend of his who became an osteopathic doctor and practices in Florida agreed to see him . Once a month he flies down there to see her, an expense we finally convinced his parents to bear. He goes to various groups run by his drug rehabilitation program during the week, and he has a “Counselor” assigned to his case (a social worker, not a therapist).
There have been several times we almost kicked him out of our home, eapecially after he stole some of my medications and those of my son on two separate occasions, but he confessed to the thefts, and has been on his best behavior since then. It hasn’t been an easy road, but we are slowly seeing progress. At this point, we consider him part of our family. Its the first time he’s lived with people who truly care about him and accept him for who he is, and not for who they wanted or expected him to be. My wife has become, in essence, his surrogate mother, and in some respects I play a similar parental role in his life. His biological parents occasionally send him money, and he gets cash assistance from the county ($200 a month), but not enough to cover his basic needs.
We’ve been trying hard to get him to accept that his life has value, that he isn;t the worthless pos he’s always been told he is, and to give him the life skills — how to handle his money, how to delay gratification and learn to control his impulsive nature, and how to remain calm even in the face of his ‘triggers, ’ among others — and gradually he’s improved in all those areas, though his life is still very much a roller coaster ride. He’s developed some physical ailments that limit him (in particular back problems and a risk of skin infections thanks to his past heroin abuse), and I don’t know if he will ever get to the point where he can live truly independently, but we are doing all we can to make that a reality for him.
Which brings me back to this past Friday, Christmas Eve. After his question to me about whether the small amount of cash was a good enough present to give, I told him he didn’t need to worry about giving me a gift, or one to my wife, either. I reminded him that he’s done many things to help out both of us over the years. Nonetheless he still felt guilty and ashamed that his gifts would be so small, and to his mind insignificant. Finally, knowing he had been raised in a strict religious setting, I suddenly remembered Jesus’ parable of the widow's offering, which seemed apropos. For anyone who doesn't know this teaching, here is how the Gospel of Mark relates it:
Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.
Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”
I spoke to him about that parable and told him that he was like the poor woman at the temple, as he was literally giving everything he had as gifts for others. “We can easily afford to give presents at Christmas,” I told him, “as we have more than enough. But you are giving all you have and that is a far greater gift.” Though neither Kenny nor I is a Christian anymore (he’s Wiccan and I’m Unitarian-Universalist), I saw that he understood what I was getting at, and it seemed to me he departed feeling a little better about himself.
On Christmas morning, we all sat around in our family room to open our gifts as is the tradition in our family. Kenny had by far the fewest, as only my wife and I had gotten him anything. To be honest, I was feeling a little bit ashamed and guilty myself that my daughter and son had so many presents from my wife and I compared to what we gave him, but he seemed happy with what he received — a rare DVD from me (he’s a movie buff) and some Tori Ramos CD’s he wanted that my wife bought for him. His gifts to my son and daughter were seven dollars apiece — all that he had.
Toward the end of the unwrapping, we opened cards from my family. My brother and sister-in-law sent all of us — well, all of us but Kenny — $10 Starbucks gift cards. Now, I’m the only one who has a Starbucks addiction, so I offered to buy their cards from them. But then my wife did the unexpected.
Kenny is fond of Starbucks’ version of the Mocha Frappacino but he never buys one for himself. He doesn’t have the money for such extravagances. Occasionally I get him one as a treat. My wife knew this. So, she turned and handed her card to Kenny. The delighted expression on his face was all I needed to convince me to follow her example. And then my daughter did the same. My son was the only holdout, but to be fair, he likes Starbucks’ frappacinos as well.
“Oh,” said Kenny, “ this is the best gift ever!” He looked like a little boy, he was so happy. But he was wrong about those cards being the best gift. The joy that shone through his face at that moment was a far, far better one, at least for me.