By Rita McInerney

Dennis Jude Dubay was among 58 young people and two adults confirmed by Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, S.S.J., on April 7 at St. John the Evangelist Church in Hapeville.

Over the past year Dennis also celebrated the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist.

He will be 15 on June 9. At his birth in Massachusetts doctors told his mother, Judi, that he wouldn’t live and, if he did, he would be a vegetable. “Forget you ever had him.” They urged her to put him in an institution.

“The doctors wouldn’t let me see him after he was born,” she recalled. He had an almost head-sized encephalocela cyst on the back of his head, and Streeter’s dysphasia (abnormal growth or development) which resulted in missing digits on his hands and feet, club feet, cleft palate. The young mother was told that her baby had a rare combination of birth defects that would handicap him both mentally and physically.

He was her second child. Her first son, Billy, had been born less than a year before. She had just turned 19 and was separated from her husband.

“I was at a loss, mentally and emotionally. I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled. Keeping the baby, doctors warned her, would ruin her life, ruin Billy’s life.

When a neurosurgeon removed the large cyst two days after Dennis’ birth, most of the tissue from the most-used side of his optic nerve damaged to the extent that he was later diagnosed legally blind.

For three weeks after he left the hospital, he was in the care of foster parents. His mother went to see him every day. She knew she wanted to raise him.

She found an apartment and took her baby home, determined to work with him, give him a chance to develop. It took him two-and-a-half years to learn to crawl. “I would get down on my hands and knees and move his arms and legs.”

Seven years ago Judi Dubay came to the Atlanta area with her two boys and daughter, Rebecca, now 12. They lived with her mother, Mrs. Peggy Mackie, who had relocated here earlier with her son.

In those seven years, Dennis has been in four different schools. He has such multiple handicaps, his mother said, that “they didn’t know what to do with him.” Now he attends Paul D. West Middle School in East Point where he has special education courses and is mainstreamed into some regular classes for the socialization aspects.

When Father Ralph Di Orio brought his healing ministry to Atlanta on Oct. 26, 1986, Judi Dubay had no intention of taking Dennis to the service at the Omni. Yet when she awoke that Sunday morning without conscious thought she began making preparations to go.

They sat in the section reserved for the seriously ill and those with disabilities. They were caught up in the surge of people pushing forward when the priest moved into their area.

Like others around him, Dennis was “slain in the spirit,” and fell back onto the floor, his mother said. “He couldn’t fake” this experience, she believed. Although she said she can’t put a date on it, his vision has been improving dramatically ever since. Doctors long ago told her that nothing could be done to improve his sight.

Mary Ann Brookshire was Dennis’ sponsor for Confirmation and also prepared him for receiving the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist. Her Confirmation gift to him was a scrapbook of his sacramental experiences.

They became friends after getting to know each other on a one-to-one basis through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Children at St. John’s. They met weekly and sometimes his sharing would surprise her.

“I’d sit and think I was going to teach,” Ms. Brookshire, a nurse at South Fulton Hospital, said. “One time we were doing the Eucharist with unconsecrated hosts and he said a big chunk of ‘This is my body’ as the priest does, almost by heart. It just knocked my socks off.”

“He knew all about the Holy Spirit,” as his Confirmation neared, she said. “He was just glowing all the time.”

Dennis invited his scoutmaster, Jesse Winfrey, to the Confirmation liturgy. Troop 117 started with Dennis and one other special child. “It’s great,” his mother said. “Everybody in it is ‘special.’ They do things the regular scouts do, like learning skills and camping.”

His sister Rebecca is a “big help.” With his ability to walk impaired, “we never thought he would be able to ride a bike. He does real well,” his mother said. He is on his fourth bike now, three have been stolen, and is not allowed to go beyond the circle where the family lives.

Rebecca also helps Dennis with his lessons. “It takes him four, five, six hours to do his homework,” Mrs. Dubay said. “He’s trying so hard to learn. He gets frustrated.” At present he reads at a high third grade level.

Through the years of school, he started at age three at the Annie Sullivan Center, a special education program in Tewksbury, Mass., Judi Dubay has received a lot of support from his teachers but not always from school officials. Sometimes she can be assertive. “You have to be.”

Last year his vision class was held in “a broom closet.” Other parents urged her to tell the administrators that wouldn’t do. This year the vision class “has a beautiful room.”

Judi Dubay’s greatest hope is that her son will be happy. He doesn’t have friends his own age; he can’t relate to them. Occasionally a boy will make fun of his awkwardness. He relates better to adults and small children, his mother said.

He enjoyed being a volunteer at a nursing home in the area before it was closed by the state for violations. He misses the older people he enjoyed wheeling about and visiting with, he told The Georgia Bulletin in his boyish, friendly voice.

Now, 15 years older, Judi Dubay puts great stress on the faith she turned away from when Dennis was an infant. Then, when she went to a priest for counseling and guidance, he told her to do what the doctors were urging her to do, give up her child. “I stopped going to church,” she admitted.

She came back to the church a few years ago - at St. John’s. A working single parent, this past September she enrolled Rebecca at the parish school.

Over the almost 15 years, during the first five of which Dennis underwent seven operations, there were many times when she was “awfully discouraged.” But she’s proven the doctors at his birth were wrong and of the long struggle she now can say, “Dennis makes it all worthwhile.”