I was three when Social Services brought Mary to our home. Recently born Mary. Angelic face. Fair. Lanky. Homeless. Unwanted. “Mentally retarded,” the social workers explained when dropping her off. An unclaimed parcel with no return address.
With no available crib, Mom lined a banana box with blankets, carefully folding the soft flannels to fit. Tucking them in. She was known for this. For collecting children society shunned. Social Services was relieved to find someone to care. And Mom did. She loved wounded and broken kids with the tenderness of Christ. For years. Decades, some. My father followed her in that.
In her seventeen years in our home, Mary never spoke. Never walked for years, and then only with great instability. Some days, frustrated by needs she couldn’t express, she spent hours screaming and thrashing, scratching and biting her own skin until it bled. Inconsolable and often uncontrollable, she frequently needed restraining for her own safety.
My foster sister, I’m certain now, was severely autistic. The term wasn’t commonly used in 1959, and even less understood. Society had other names for people like Mary. Derogatory names not used today, though their stinging echo remains.
I wish I had understood her better. I often resented her strangeness. Didn’t understand that behind that shattered mind and disabled body, beyond that angelic face fringed by fine blonde hair, lay a person created in God’s image. Loved immeasurably by him. A person imprisoned at birth by nature’s cruelty.
Mary attended church with us. She loved the hymns. Sometimes at home, during her worst moments of loudly expressed frustration, when nothing calmed her, she gazed into the top corner of the room and began humming. Always in tune. Haltingly at first, in short bursts, with sobs between.
The hymns she hummed all spoke of Jesus. Of his nearness. His love. His friendship and understanding. She particularly liked, “There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus. No, not one. None else can heal all our soul’s diseases. No, not one.”
Eventually, she stopped rocking. Became placid and slept, tears staining her alabaster cheeks.
Mary choked to death on a hot dog at seventeen. I sang at her funeral, watching my grief-stricken parents in their pew. “Be still my soul, the Lord is on your side. Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain…”
When others misunderstand and mistreat us, when our life becomes more than we can handle alone, many of us seek first counsellors, psychologists, therapists, medications and other treatments. Those are often necessary and very helpful.
But each time I hear of those desperately chasing healing, I think of Mary, in her own private prison, serving a life sentence for a crime she didn’t commit. Mary, humming a song to and about the only friend who understood her completely and always brought peace. The lowly Jesus she lives with now, finally whole and healthy.
When you have hard times, remember this first: Tell it to Jesus. No one understands like Jesus. And sometimes, being understood is the best healer.
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