It’s hard to say exactly how Christopher’s visitation affected our grief over his death. Without it, I think we would have been crushed by the incompleteness of his life, suddenly severed by his bizarre drowning. Despite the vision we’d had, we had no lasting feeling of joy or triumph or relief. We had to explain Chris’s death to his brothers, and that was the hardest task of all.
Chris had been the second of triplets, born prematurely, weighing barely more than two pounds. Jonathan and Jefferson had thrived and grown into healthy, vigorous, and gifted children. Chris had suffered brain injury shortly after birth, apparently from an episode of apnea, which left him developmentally disabled and prone to seizures. Despite his disabilities, he had become remarkable in his own unique ways: in the flashes of humor and poetry and insight that graced his speech; in his total fascination with every mechanical or electrical device ever invented and his ability to break anything in the blink of an eye, no matter how closely he was watched; in his boundless capacity for love and forgiveness and his inexhaustible propensity to try the patience of everyone who knew him, except his grandmother. In Christopher’s world, no person was to be left untested, no limit was to be left intact. He loved it that way, and no reward or punishment could change it.
The possible adverse consequences of his behavior fascinated Chris in the same way that knobs and latches did. He would do anything just to see the effect—with one exception. He would do nothing mean or hurtful to others, and if he sensed in any way that his provocative behavior caused another person pain rather than mere anger or annoyance, he would stop. As for rewards, they all seemed rather petty to him. Sure, he loved his mom’s pancakes, his grandma’s cookies, the roller coaster at Lake Compounce, and watching the Muppets. But the one thing that Chris most wanted was the one thing he could never have: to be like his brothers, attend the same school, play the same sports.
The most memorable aspect of Chris’s bad behavior was the deliberation that he brought to it. One Sunday morning when Chris was about 10, he awakened us at the crack of dawn, demanding attention.
“Chris, it’s still dark,” I said to him. “Go back to bed.”
“I want you to get up,” he said flatly.
“I’m tired, Chris. I want to sleep some more. Now go back to your bed.”
He looked quickly around the bedroom. “If you don’t get up,” he insisted, “I’ll touch everything I see.” He quickly catalogued the items on the dresser in front of him. “I’ll touch . . . the money . . . the glasses . . . the phone . . .” Then he laughed and laughed.
A school psychologist once described Chris as engaging in some form of attention-getting behavior at least every five minutes. It could be maddening, but there were always ways of getting Chris to stop, if you didn’t let your own anger at him get in the way. There were many times when I realized how irrational it was to get angry at Chris, because my own anger only fed his oppositional nature and made it more obstinate. I would feel very smart at having understood this, and then I would get angry anyway. No matter how smart I was, Chris could show me that I was pretty stupid underneath it all. Eventually I would recognize that Chris was destined to test everyone he knew to the limits of their endurance and to totally destroy the myths they had created about themselves. If you thought you were a reasonable and mature person, Chris could drive you out of control. If you thought you were kind and good, Chris could bring out your violence and hostility. And if you thought you were a loser, Chris could show you that you were an effective human being. He had a genius for sensing and confounding people’s ideas about themselves.
Chris was a paradox in many other ways. He lived a very difficult life, full of disappointment and heartbreak. There were so many things he wanted to be able to do, because his brothers did them, but that he was incapable of doing. Yet he never showed a trace of bitterness or self-pity. He loved being himself. He was proud of being Christopher. Not because of anything he did or accomplished, but simply because he was.
He felt the same way about other people also. When he went to school, he was glad to see each and every pupil and member of the staff. He would stand in the doorway and shout, “Hello, I’m back!” He didn’t care if someone was inarticulate, strapped into a wheelchair rocking back and forth, and unaware of his presence. That person was an individual to Chris and he would pay him the respect of an individual “hello.” He didn’t care if someone was pretty or ugly, rich or poor, generous or miserly—they were all the same. Not because he didn’t recognize the difference, but because it didn’t matter to him.
Although Chris encountered a number of mean and angry people during his life, he never held a grudge. If someone had been physically abusive, Chris might avoid him—or provoke him—but Chris would never stay angry at him. Not because his memory was bad; Chris remembered everything, especially broken promises. I have never known anyone with Chris’s capacity to forgive.
When Chris finished his schooling, at the age of 21, he went to live at North Plain Farm in Great Barrington, a small community created as an outgrowth of the Camphill movement, which had started in England. The basis of the community was “Lifesharing.” People with developmental and intellectual disabilities lived and worked together along with their helpers, sharing their lives. Growth came from each person’s effort in building community.
Lifesharing is grounded in the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian educator and visionary who founded the Waldorf School movement. In 1906, at the age of 40, Steiner startled the academic world by publicly describing his psychic experiences—a shocking revelation from an acclaimed scholar. He spent the next two and a half decades building a series of international movements to apply his spiritual insights to education, agriculture, and the healing arts. Personally, I had found Steiner’s writings to be difficult and esoteric and his views on health care to be mystifying. But I was impressed by the practical achievements of his educational philosophy and felt great respect for those individuals who were attempting to apply it.
There were three small farms near Great Barrington in addition to North Plain that were part of the Lifesharing community: Buena Vista Farm, Orchard House, and Shadowood. The total community numbered about 40 people.
Needless to say, Christopher’s bottomless individualism was a profound challenge to the whole community, and the demands of Lifesharing were a profound challenge to Christopher.
Chris rose to the challenge, but he never stopped tempting fate. Six weeks before his death, while working at a cooperative garden near Orchard House, Chris climbed into one of the group’s minivans, which was parked on the edge of a hill. Placing himself in the driver’s seat, he released the emergency brake and shifted into neutral. The van rolled off the shoulder of the road and through the fields. It careened down a quarter mile of pasture and came to rest in a clump of bushes at the bottom of a hill. Miraculously, Chris was unhurt and the van was barely scratched. Chris didn’t speak a word for two hours afterward. A few days later, on a visit to the farm, Christina asked him why he had taken the van. He beamed his ear-to-ear grin and said triumphantly, “I wanted to drive!”
During his nine months at North Plain Farm, Christopher’s conquest of himself became a focal point for the growth and cohesiveness of the community. If he could trust the group enough to relinquish his constant testing of limits, then the community itself was validated. By the time of his death, he had crossed the threshold and a new era for Chris seemed at hand. Death suddenly destroyed the possibility of going further.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Jonathan with quiet anger when we told him about Christopher’s death. “His life was tragic and so is his death. It’s too painful to talk about.” Jon had been fiercely protective of his brother ever since the age of two, when he first perceived that Chris was different. He had no interest in the story of our visit from Chris’s Spirit, nor did Jeff. Two weeks earlier, the two had gone to Great Barrington to spend a weekend with Chris. As he planned the trip, Jon had said to us, “I really need a dose of Christopher.” The phrase stuck: “a dose of Christopher.” It was the way Jon remembered his brother: ingenuous, direct, and a constant threat to the hypocrisy of convention. As one example, Chris took his holidays seriously. On Easter or at Christmastime, he would walk down the street or through a mall, introducing himself to people and wishing them well, whether they wanted to acknowledge him or not. “Happy Easter,” he would say. “I’m Chris. I hope you have a nice holiday.” “Merry Christmas. I’m Chris. Can I shake your hand?” For Jon, that was the real Christopher, not a ghost.
Only Jordan, our youngest child, not yet nine years old, accepted the story of Chris’s visit. He and Chris had been very close. Jordan would never forget how Chris would embrace him and shriek, “You’re my little brother!” He knew through and through that Christopher’s Spirit was immortal. When he saw his mother crying and clutching Chris’s picture, he placed his arms around her neck. Christina sobbed, “I can’t believe that this is my life, without Christopher in it.”
Jordan responded, with complete certainty, “Don’t worry, Mommy, he’s fine.”