Not all of us makes the best of the hand of cards that fate has dealt us, but Paul Andrews met someone who definitely did – “one of the most remarkable people I have met”.
It is not easy to convey the flavour of Stephen. When I first met him, he was a thin, delicate-looking man who weighed barely seven stone and looked younger than his thirty-six years. He smiled easily, and seemed unsurprisable. The one thing that surprised him was that he was still alive.
He had been born with a congenital heart and lung condition. He was not just a delicate baby; he barely survived. His mother knew all about keeping children alive. She worked with the nuns to visit and help parents with handicapped children, in days when State help was minimal. Stephen often went with her, and learned a lot about caring.
But he paid a price for the long periods when he was too sick for school. He was put into a slow learners’ class in his primary school. He seemed to have been dealt a particularly poor hand of cards. It was only in his early teens that his ailments had stabilized to some extent, and he was able to stay at school for longer periods. By fifteen he was near the top of his class.
Independent living
He learned to cook, to play the guitar and mandolin, to paint, play pitch and putt, and fish a bit in the canal – all occupations that involve the hands; and Stephen’s hands were arthritic to the point where the pain seriously sapped his energy. He got by with a careful and minimal use of painkillers. More than that, he got by with prayer, and a sense that the bad days would give way to days that were not as bad.
You might think that he would grow up dependent, a mother’s boy. Not so. By the time I knew him, he drove his own car, and rented a place in west Dublin. ‘A place?’ I asked him. He smiled. ‘In my block the front rooms have a good view and they are called apartments. The back ones are called flats. I’m in a flat.’
Rock ‘n roll years
Would any of you remember a band called Strawberry Cross? No, I didn’t think you would. They won a prize as the best new band of 1994 – but that was their only prize. They did gigs here and there, including a trip to Germany, but their biggest take on anyone night was €7. As Stephen said with a smile, ‘You had to pay to play’. Despite his sicknesses he was the leader, the activator, as well as playing mandolin and guitar.
He took all the grief. The rejection letters were addressed to him. He had learned, in a way that the healthy musicians had not learned, that you can take a lot of grief and still survive. It took a good deal of grief before they recognized that the world was not clamouring for them, and moved to other occupations. But Stephen looked back on those wandering years as the good times.
Distressing experiences
There were bad times too. What made Stephen indignant was what he saw as the unfairness of life to his mother. As well as Stephen she had cared heroically for her sick husband until his Alzheimer’s wanderings defeated her; then she found him a good nursing home. When she should have been able to enjoy life for herself, she was struck down by Parkinson’s and confined to a wheelchair. Stephen stayed close and longed to lift her spirits; but you could see the pain when he spoke of her.
By the time I met him, he had learned computer graphics in Germany, and travelled in Spain, Albania, Africa, and USA. What distressed him grievously in his travels was not the poverty of Africa, or the Mafia-style crooks who surrounded Mother Teresa’s nuns in Albania, but what he found on his return to Europe. He was fresh from tasting the destitution in Africa, and the thoughtless affluence he experienced in the Netherlands was too much for him.
Though he did not talk much religion, his passion for God, and for justice, shone through all the time. He thought of the priesthood, but his health would not have survived the long training. Instead he trained to be an art therapist, and offered his services free in a psychiatric hospital.
Untouched by sin
One schizophrenic girl was referred to Stephen by the psychiatrist: ‘I cannot reach her; nobody can’. Stephen took her slowly and she started to draw and paint, and then to talk. What was his secret? A vulnerability, totally unthreatening, in league with the weakest. I think of him as pre-Adamite, somehow untouched by original sin.
The last day I met him, he astonished me by producing a painting: two bare-footed African boys facing a brilliant sun, and looking at a hand of cards. He wrote: ‘To Paul. Thank you for helping me make sense of the cards in hand. Stephen’.
Ready for the end
A month later he was with a friend at home, when he suddenly started to spit blood, and within an hour he was dead. He had lived from day to day in readiness for death: I never know will I get as far as bedtime, and when I wake up, it is a surprise. It was not a case of waiting for the end, but rather of living every day to its fullest. He could easily have pitied himself and become a professional invalid. Instead he packed more into his years than our most successful young tigers.
To have known Stephen was a particular grace. This funny, self-mocking boy, who loved God and radiated goodness, was one of the most remarkable people I have met.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (January 2007), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
