It was in 1957 and I had been working at Byberry (Philadelphia State Mental Hospital) for a year or so when I got a phone call from building E-2. This was to come over and see what the new attendant, Jack Field (who had replaced me on that building) had been doing with Darrel Smith, one of the patients. They said I was going to be amazed. I had worked on E-2 for a while and was very familiar with Darrel. He was about 40 years old, in good shape, but he was quite crazy. My ward had the patients who not only had mental problems, but were also crippled and/or incontinent. There are all kinds of mental illness and all kinds of degrees of severity which can affect people. Some patients could go for long periods of time functioning quite well. But most of my patients were pretty consistently impaired.
You couldn’t get Darrel dressed very easily. You could get some clothes on him in the morning but they wouldn’t stay on long. So for the most part I didn’t try. Wednesday and Sunday were visiting days and I would have to keep him dressed but it was a hassle that I did not look forward to and I wouldn’t bother on the rest of the days. For the most part he would spend his days standing in the middle of the day room looking up to the ceiling in the clothes he was born in talking away in some stuttering, incomprehensible gibberish and answering natures’ calls on the first ring whenever they came to him. While the other patients would have different “life styles”, quite a few shared that last habit. And they all shared the same future. After their early diagnosis, and perhaps some bouts with shock therapy, it was determined that about all that could be done for them was to house them, and give them some drugs to calm them down if they became a problem.
From my perspective there was nothing that could be done for them and I certainly didn’t have any good ideas. There wasn’t any way that I was going to change the prognosis for 45 mental patients during my 8 hour shift, so I walked them through the tunnels to the mess hall for their meals, made sure the “worker” patients got the mopping up done and the beds cleaned up and made, and in general just coped with meeting the minimum required to make it through the day.
So you can understand my astonishment when I went over to E-2 and down to my old ward. There was Jack, in the little cage office we had in one corner of the large room in which the patients slept, talking with Darrel. Jack and I were at different ends of the age spectrum. I was 18 when I started at Byberry and Jack was around 50. He had been a medic in the navy during WW2 and had three neat little wounds in one leg from a Japanese .30 caliber machine gun that he received while helping the Marines in one of their landings. We became good friends and fishing buddies over the next couple of years.
Shortly after Jack took over my ward he started a pattern of taking Darrel out of the day room and, once the morning chores were in hand, bringing him into the cage office and just talking to him. He kept telling Darrel that he knew that Darrel could understand him, and that he could talk sensibly if he wanted to. Jack would do this every day for a period of time. Finally there was a break through. Darrel started coming out of his own world and began responding to Jack. He spoke in short bursts, and there was still pronounced stuttering, but now it was a direct, reasonable response to questions. Jack said: “Darrel, you remember Ken from when he worked here last year don’t you?” He looked right at me and said he remembered me. We talked for a little bit. I don’t remember what we said but I clearly remember that Darrel was now capable of communicating. And Jack and others were now going to be able to communicate with him.
Over the years the lesson from that experience took form as I reflected on the contrast between Jack’s approach to the job and my own. As I clearly could not cure the 45 patients, there did not seem to be much sense in trying, so I did nothing but cope with meeting the minimum requirements.
Jack did what he could
He could not do what he did for Darrel with all 45 patients, but he did not let that discourage him from doing what he could do for Darrel. He looked for what he could do to make a difference. And he did it.
The discouragement that we all experience in our lives at some times with some problems can cause us to consciously despair of things ever getting better. This can close off possible avenues that could bring hope, because we give up investing time and effort in thinking positively about what we might be able to do that could bring about change. Instead of looking for what we can do, we give up and do nothing.
Mary of Bethany must have felt overwhelmed by the discouraging events that were overtaking everything and everyone associated with Jesus. The organized religious establishment, the scribes, the Pharisees and the priests, were all uniting in one common purpose, to execute Jesus. She was a woman. What could she do? She did not have the ear of the leadership. And even if she did, events were moving with an irreversible momentum. Pilate’s wife had Pilate’s ear but that did not help.
But Mary turned her thoughts to what she could do. It was in her power to take the treasure she had in the alabaster box of spikenard ointment and put it to a far better use than any such treasure had ever been used before. The account in Mark 14:1-9 no doubt conjures slightly different pictures in the imaginations of us all. I see a woman coming in to a dinner and disrupting it completely resulting in what must have been a range of reactions, including the murmuring about the waste of the ointment that could have been used to raise cash for the poor. Doing something often brings murmuring. The murmurs can range from the legitimate questions by those who do not understand, to the defensive postures sometimes taken by those made uncomfortable about their own lack of actions. And then there can be those who act from seriously wrong motives, like Judas who really wanted to get his hands on the money.
Jesus answered the murmurers. He tells them to leave her alone. He puts the humanitarian concerns in perspective less they overshadow spiritual matters. And he says: “She hath done what she could…:”
What Jack did for Darrel, and what we are likely to do, will not be in the same league as what Mary did. As long as we do what we can we will have acquitted ourselves well. After all, that is all that is expected of us. We will not be faulted for failing to effect changes we believe will be beneficial. We are only responsible for doing what we can.
Jesus’ concluding words were “Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her” (Mark 14:9). We do still talk about it. I just did. And I still think about what Jack did. Sometimes it is the little things that really stand out.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One