Henry

This week, as I learned the news of the massacre at Virginia Tech, I felt sad for the families of the victims. I too have had children in college. But for some reason I felt an unspeakable sadness for the young man who did it. At first, as I heard things about his writings and withdrawn nature, I felt sure that something horrendous must have happened to him sometime in the past. But I don't know if that is necessarily so. Mental illness can so totally play with the mind, and perhaps that was more the cause than some traumatic abuse or experience. Unfortunately, for most of us it is easy to condemn, blame, criticize, and even despise anything we do not understand or have close ties to. It seems that only when we know and love someone who is different than we are or struggles with something that we do not, do we have the compassion they so desperately need. Yes, what Sueng-Hui Cho did this week was a terrible, terrible thing, but he must have had tremendous needs.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, on Thursday of this week I knew why my heart ached so much for Sueng-Hui Cho. I remembered Henry, and the tears began to flow. I knew that my Saturday story this week would need to be titled Henry. This is not a funny story, it's not scary, it's not inspirational. It is just profoundly sad.

HENRY

In the spring of 1984 our three children ranged in age from four to ten, and our foster daughter Miki was a seventeen-year-old junior in high school. Our foster agency called to ask if we could do respite care for one weekend for an eleven-year-old boy named Henry. He had just spent several days with a potential foster family, but they wanted to have a weekend without him to make their decision before he moved in. Having a boy in the house that was just a year older than Lisa was not something we would have wanted long term, but we certainly could keep him for the weekend.

Henry came and we had a good weekend with him. All weekend he talked excitedly about the farm he would be moving to. Monday morning arrived and so did his caseworker - with bad news. The family had decided they could not take him. I will never forget sitting there watching his reaction. My heart just ached for him and my immediate reaction was that surely we could somehow give him a place in our family. However, we told the caseworker our reservations about having a boy that age in our home, which the agency understood, and we agreed to keep him while they looked for another placement for him. Our children were glad he would be staying longer.

Henry stayed five weeks. Another family was found who would take him, but their school district would not, and in the end another agency found a placement for him. Before long we heard that he had been taken to a juvenile psychiatric facility. We were told that Henry had been diagnosed with a mental illness. We were not surprised; in fact, we felt somewhat relieved.

In trying to describe the five weeks of living with Henry I will need to sound like I am describing two different people. The one Henry was extremely kind and loving, with a great tenderness for the things of God. The only music he wanted to listen to was a tape of The Witmer Trio. He listened to it in his room over and over again, he went to sleep with it on every night, and he knew every word by heart. We gave him blank tapes to entertain himself, and he would record himself praying.

The other Henry would "snap" at the slightest provocation and obsess over any little thing. When the marker he was using bled through and messed up another picture he had done, he suddenly went on a rampage that could not be stopped until he had thrown everything that belonged to him outside on the lawn in the pouring rain.

At one point he decided that he absolutely had to have a "George" card (you have to be old enough to know what that was!) from our local bank. One day he would not stop riding his bike through the drive-up window of the bank until they would give him a George card. The police needed to be called.

Another day he found Anthony's toy hunting rifle and began acting as though he were shooting everybody in all the pictures on our family photo wall. He said, "Maybe someday I'll come and do that to all of you." Meanwhile, four-year-old Jeremy looked on in fear. As I tried to persuade him to give the toy rifle to me he slapped me.

If the sweet Henry had been present more often than the unpredictable, unreasonable Henry, we probably would have decided that he should stay with us rather than experience one more rejection and one more move. But sweet Henry made increasingly rare appearances. Because his placement was in limbo, Henry was not in school those five weeks, but rather at home with Jeremy and me every day all day long. I was slowly but surely burning out from the emotional toll he took on me. Our children were becoming afraid of him and started to feel that we cared more about his special needs than we did theirs. Our family could not continue like that long term.

The call came on a Friday afternoon that another agency had found a placement for him and that they would come yet that afternoon to pick him up. I could not believe it. Yes, we could not continue life with him in our home, but no, we could not just have him snatched away that quickly with no chance for our children to say goodbye to him. We had plans that weekend that he was really looking forward to. I convinced them to let him stay until Monday.

That weekend sweet Henry returned for the entire weekend. He did not want to leave. He even said, "They're probably not even a Christian family, and who knows what kind of music they listen to and they probably watch bad things on TV all the time." My heart was in torture all weekend long. How could we be turning him out like this? But how could our family survive with him in it? The goodbyes on Monday morning were very tearful ones. After he left I laid across my bed and wept with deep sorrow for him and for us.

A few weeks later was his twelfth birthday. Through the agency we were given an invitation to his birthday party. He was being permitted to go home to his biological mother's house for his birthday, and the party would be there. We went to the party that Sunday afternoon. We and a neighbor lady were the only ones at the party. Henry was as sweet as he had ever been, telling us over and over how he missed us and how he disliked his new family. Even his mother said that he was so much happier with us and wondered why he couldn't have stayed. I was wracked with guilt by the time we left. Even our children were starting to feel like we should let him come back. Anthony said, "Henry WAS really nice sometimes."

A few months later we heard that he had been admitted to a juvenile psychiatric hospital and that before he had even been in our home, his diagnosis was such that there were questions as to whether it was safe to place him with a family. Looking back now I cannot help but wonder why he was not on any medication, but I'm sure there was much less understanding of the brain in 1984 than there is now. It took a long time for me to be able to come to terms with our apparent failure to be what Henry needed. In my annual letter that Christmas I wrote, "If even Christian families cannot meet their needs, what is to become of all the Henrys in this world?"

Life went on and we lost track of Henry. Four years later I read in the paper that Henry was was accused of murdering a nine-year-old boy. Henry had gone to the library and told the boy that he was a friend of the boy's mother and was supposed to take him home. Later, in an alley near the library, the nine-year-old's dead body was found. For some reason I felt like I had to go see Henry and sing to him the songs from that tape he had loved so much. I called a woman who worked with a prison ministry in that town to find out if there was any way I could get to visit him, but he wasn't in the local prison at that time. She said he probably would be there in a few months when they held the trial.

But a few months later I read in the newspaper that Henry had admitted he murdered the boy and that there would be no trial. He would be committed to a State prison for life without the possibility of parole. And that is the last thing I ever heard about Henry. When I googled his name this week there was nothing - like he never existed.

In a prison somewhere there is probably a man named Henry who will soon turn thirty-five. I don't feel guilty anymore. I know we were not at all equipped to meet his needs. But I do feel deep compassion for him. And I especially feel compassion for the family of Seung-Hui Cho.