Dead Cant Rant

If you haven’t already, read the previous post Unwelcome And Unwanted. It’s a fairly quick read, and is essential to understand what you’re about to read.

Good.

In last Sunday’s paper there was an absolutely amazing story that will show you just how repugnant Ms. Crow truly is.

Jonathan Conder was 16 years old when he discovered that the man he had called father his entire life was not his true biological father. Jonathan was a troubled teen, and his mother decided she wanted her life back, so she dumped Jonathan with his father, John Conder. John Conder did not know until then that he had a son.

John and his wife, Jeanne, took Jonathan in and vowed to raise him. It wasn’t easy because, though John and Jeanne had been married for about 15 years, Jonathan had a learning disability and was a very difficult child to deal with. Jeanne quit her marketing job to stay home with Jonathan, dug in her heels, and went to work.

Jonathan graduated from high school thanks to Jeanne and his father, and moved out on his own. Two months later, an underage drunk driver — out celebrating the return of his license, suspended for DWI — slammed into Jonathan’s car. There was so much blood gushing out of Jonathan’s mouth that the first person on the scene later said she was absolutely certain he had died.

Jonathan survived, but as a paraplegic is confined to a wheelchair, and has permanent brain damage. He lives with Jeanne and John, and every day Jeanne takes him to occupational therapy.

What does this have to do with Ms. Crow’s article?

And he thanks his stepmom. Thanks for lunch. Thanks for picking me up from school. Thanks for being there. Jeanne still is surprised by the words. The old Jonathan wasn’t like this. This Jonathan can’t thank her enough.

“Every day, when I pick him up from school, he asks how my day was,” Jeanne said, smiling at him.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he asks.

“I think it’s amazing that she sacrifices so much. They could’ve disowned me.”

Not likely. They fought to keep him when his mother wanted him to go back to New York with her. They pushed for Mark Staffon to get the maximum jail time. He’s currently serving six years. Now, she makes sure Jonathan gets the best treatment and the little things that make him happy. Like when he dressed as a pirate for Halloween and went to a local haunted house for Halloween.

Jonathan’s gratitude keeps Jeanne going. She honestly doesn’t get those parents who resent their suddenly disabled child, who obsess over the loss of their former lives.

She looked at Jonathan shortly after his accident, lying in a coma with titanium screws in his head, and wondered how she was going to take care of him. She had no idea. But she couldn’t not try.

“Her first boy,” her husband, John, mused. “Other people could’ve just stood back and looked at their lives and decided, ‘This isn’t for me.’ She didn’t. That’s why she’s an angel.”

Jonathan came home almost eight months after his accident. He lived in a hospital bed in the living room because they couldn’t get him up and down the stairs. They had to take him to their church to give him a shower, as it had a handicapped stall.

They moved into a one-story home that August where Jeanne is grateful for little things like tile floors.

“I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.” Because, of course, it’s easier to use a wheelchair and walker on the smooth floor than the carpeted one.

Leisurely lunches with the girls are a thing of the past, as are quick weekend getaways to Northern California with her husband. Jonathan is their constant companion.

Friends — whom Jeanne now thinks of as “other” friends, meaning those who don’t have children with traumatic brain injury — have gradually fallen away. Jeanne says it’s because they’d like it to be over, for Jonathan to get better and for his parents’ lives to stop revolving around him. These are small sacrifices.

“It’s kind of a myth, that you’re constantly yearning for what you don’t have,” Jeanne said. “We’re grownups. Life is hard. Yes, your life changes. But you have to do good in this world. It could’ve been worse, which would be to deal with the senseless death of a boy in his prime. Is he different? Yeah. He’ll ask things over and over and it’ll drive you crazy. But how could you resent him?

“It doesn’t mean it’s a bad life. It’s just a different life. … You just change what’s important. We want him to be happy. He has enough to deal with.”

…

She claims that if you’d asked her 10 years ago if she could do what she’s doing now, she’d have said no. But then Jonathan points out that this is the same woman who once, through Project Cuddle, took in a pregnant college student who’d been kicked out of her home by her parents and helped raise her baby for a year.

Jeanne Conder went on to found MOM: Mothers of Miracles, a support group for mothers of traumatically brain-injured children. The miracle? That their children are alive.

It’s funny how you look at things when you think of your child as a miracle.

For Ms. Crow, her wants and demands and lifestyle were so important to her that she killed her unborn child to maintain the status quo. Jeanne Conder sacrificed her career and her lifestyle to care for a stranger she took in as her own son. For her, the needs of her son outweighed her wants in a career or any other facet of her life. She gave it all up, and he is eternally grateful.

Ms. Crow’s child will never be able to say “thank you”, because he or she is dead, and Ms. Crow doesn’t care.

She truly is a most contemptible and reprehensible human being.

For more information on Jonathan Conder, visit Jonathan Conder’s Recovery Site. There you can see messages from the family, letters from their vast network of friends and family, and this moving prayer from John Conder, in which you can detect a father’s fear that his son would die in the days following the wreck.