Our Brother's Keeper

For an executive director of a public education leadership-development organization, I am a private person. I tend to leave my work out of my family life and the opposite is also true. On only two occasions have I used this blog to write about family issues, the first time in honor of Mother's Day and the second time to recount my daughter's birthday celebration. Four days ago I knew once again I had to penetrate the work-family membrane in order to share a leadership lesson. Without apology, I promise that this blog will be as hard for you to read as it is for me to write.

It began last Thursday. My brother John, a lifelong bachelor, was spending the night with our mom at her Greensboro condo. He was there because upon visiting his Asheboro home, Mom determined that John's recently-broken foot and lack of appetite too infirmed for him to stay at his own house, a delapidated trailer situated in a park that my dad built 50 years ago. Tonight John lies poised between life and death.

What happened, you ask? I could write that John broke out in a fever and began to have difficulty breathing while a guest in Mom's house; that she called an ambulance that rushed him to Randolph Memorial Hospital; that he was bleeding internally; that his kidney's, lungs, and casted leg were terribly infected; that his heart, already burdened by one major attack, was failing; or that John's breathing could be sustained only by an oxygen mask that soon became a ventilator. I could write those things and, although true, they would be only part of the truth.

What happened was this: Johnny had an older brother that got all the good genes and good luck while he got the bad genes and bad luck. He was born prematurely, weighing little more than two and half pounds, and kept in an incubator away from his mother for nearly a month. Johnny's young father was less interested in his mother and him than he was in continuing to sow wild oats.

Johnny nearly drowned when he was toddler; fell victim to the manipulation of an emotionally-ill grandmother who methodically sowed in him seeds of self-doubt; struggled throughout public school with an undiagnosed learning disability; set off a pipe bomb on the playground of his junior high school as his brother was graduating from high school across the street; failed ninth grade and eventually dropped out of high school when he was 16; lost his driver's license by attempting to outrun the highway patrol and driving while impaired when he was 18; and lost his dad when he was 24. John's early adult life was punctuated by repeated skirmishes with the law.

Johnny worked in a variety of occupations. The one that fulfilled him most was owning and cooking in  several restaurants that he operated with Mom. In every case, however, lack of planning or misjudgment of employees led to business failure. He was unable to hold on to a job at the Department of Sanitation in Asheboro because he could not pass the state examination mathematics section. Johnny sabotaged all his relationships with the opposite sex and ultimately fell in with a bad crowd that led to a 10-year addiction to crack cocain. To feed his habit, he stole from his mother, stole from local merchants, dealt drugs, and was eventually arrested. He resisted the family's repeated attempts to intervene.

Johnny was, however, a funny and intelligent human being with whom people were ready to relate. Something about the man made everyone see in him a little bit of themselves or at least something of which they wished they dared to be. He would regale friends and family in long reinactments of JFK's inaugural address or MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. Johnny had a trick memory that caused him to remember not only the lyrics to every Elvis Presley song ever written but the things you said at a family dinner 20 years ago that you wish you hadn't. And Johnny didn't hesitate to remind you of your inconsistency. He loved animals and took in strays, possessed a heart so generous that he took toys destined for the K-Mart dumpster to give to needy children, took interest and pride in his nephew and niece and taught them every foolish limerick and country proverb known to mankind. Johnny was so bold that, at the age of 5, he demanded from a larcenous playmate the toy pistol of his older brother who was impotently analyzing how he might retrieve his property without a scene. Let the record show that Johnny loved and was loved.

Yet the family finds itself having to face increasingly brutal facts. Beyond social and spiritual corrosion, the other thing that was happening to Johnny all those years was the destruction of his body. Last night, my sister, an education professional like me, told me that when she researched the effects of crack cocain use over time, every symptom now killing our brother could be traced to the drug. Combined with heart and artery disease, Johnny's lungs may now have been so damaged that we could be forced either to keep him on artificial respiration or let him go.

I promised you a lesson. It is not just say "no" to drugs or that some people have been dealt a bad hand. Simply it is this: The world is full of Johnny Binghams. They attend our schools and they work in our businesses. We may share Sunday dinner with them. But if we love our students and our employees as our family, we will know our Johnnys and we will do everything within our power to help them. We may or may not succeed but we must try and when the trying is done, we will celebrate another chance at life or we will eulogize a loved one in death. Either way, we are our brother's keeper.