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BY KATHI STEARNS
Staff Writer
LAWRENCEVILLE--Nancy and Ken Proctor already had four girls when
they learned they were expecting their fifth child. They prayed that their new
child would be a son, if it were God’s will, a boy to carry on the Proctor
name, a boy with whom Ken could play baseball and basketball and rough house in
the way a father does with his son.
On Feb. 22, 1965, the Proctor family received their boy, Ron
Edward. And, unexpectedly, seven years later they received another son when
Nancy gave birth to Daniel on Jan. 25, 1972.
They felt more than blessed.
Neither Nancy nor Ken could have imagined then the trauma having
Dan and Ron would bring to their family. Nor could they imagine how their faith
would be tested, or how well it would stand up to the unimaginable.
When Ron was one year old, he reached for the TV control knob and
fell. His mother noticed with alarm that, after the fall, his joints began to
swell.
“He ballooned from his waist to his knees,” she said.
“When I tried to change his diaper and move his legs, he screamed in pain.
I knew immediately something was very wrong.”
Nancy rushed her son to the hospital where his doctors informed
her that her son had hemophilia, a hereditary plasma-coagulation disorder
principally affecting males. Hemophilia is transmitted by females and
characterized by excessive, sometimes spontaneous, bleeding.
An experienced mother, Nancy describes herself as someone usually
low key about the trials and tribulations that come her way. She’d had
good training. She was only 15, the oldest of nine children, when her father
was killed by a train. Her mother, unable to pay the bills, was forced to put
all eight of her younger children in an orphanage.
After that, Nancy says she started to attend a lot of church
activities because she felt the closer she was to the church, the farther away
she was from the temptations that a normal teenager faces. At an early age, the
church had become her lifeline.
“I’ve always had a very close relationship with
God,” Nancy said. “I think He knew I needed that. My mother’s
motto was ‘No matter what happens, God is going to take care of it.’
I really adopted that motto.”
Nancy more easily accepted what was to come, but Ken struggled at
times.
“Nancy’s faith has always been stronger than mine,”
Ken said. “I’ve always believed that God doesn’t give you more
than you can handle. Sometimes I’ve believed my plate was full and the
Lord put a little more on it. I just know that, as the plate gets heavier, He
becomes more present in my daily life.”
Now Nancy and her husband felt their faith tested.
Shocked at the diagnosis, the couple grieved together for their
son and the activities he would never be able to enjoy because of this
disorder.
“The doctor told us that our son would never ride a bike and
do the things that a normal boy would do,” she said. “He would never
have the opportunity to be on the baseball, football or wrestling teams and
would not be able to be normally rambunctious with kids his age.”
And they grieved for the dreams they had for Ron that would never
come true.
“For the first six months to a year I felt sorry for
myself,” Ken said. “I concentrated on the things he couldn’t do
instead of what he could. I wanted my son to have a normal life like all the
other kids. I grieved for him but the reality was, what was special was who he
was, not what he could or could not do.”
The Proctors did not let the grief paralyze them. The day after
diagnosis they began to restructure daily life. They padded their whole house
with foam to prevent Ron from bumping into things, and they began making weekly
trips to the hospital for Ron’s blood transfusions. They bought knee and
elbow pads for their son and tried to find safe activities for him to
participate in without making him feel as if he lived in a glass house.
In the first year of treating Ron’s hemophilia, the
family,then parishioners at Corpus Christi Church, Stone Mountain, spent over
$64,000 for blood transfusions.
The family went on the offensive. They attacked the disorder every
way they knew how. And they trusted that God would take care of it all.
Then in January 1972 their second son, Dan, was also diagnosed as
a hemophiliac two days after he was born. Even then, their acceptance of
God’s will remained firm.
“The fact that Dan had hemophilia was not a shock to
us,” Ken said. “At that point in time we had seen that Ron was able
to lead a pretty normal life when the hemophilia was under control. We were
pretty optimistic about both of our sons’ futures.”
The doctors told Nancy, who had no previous formal medical
training, that since she had two hemophiliac children she was going to need to
learn how to draw and give blood.
“It was something I got used to,” she said. “It
just became a daily part of our lives in caring for the children.” She did
it, day in and day out. As her sons became older, they began to give themselves
the blood concentrate.
In 1985, after 20 years of blood transfusions, Nancy received a
letter from the Hemophilia Foundation of Georgia. Some of the lots of blood
that had been sent for her sons were being recalled. Nothing was ever simple
after that.
“We had already used the recalled blood so there wasn’t
much we could do,” Nancy said. “The letter didn’t say what was
wrong with the blood, so we just continued to live our lives hoping and praying
for the best.”
Ken did not look further into the reason for the recall of the
blood either.
“Even though we felt that this could be a big deal, we knew
God would take care of it,” he said.
Three years after the letter, in November of 1988, Nancy and Ken
learned that both of their sons had contracted the AIDS virus through the
contaminated blood transfusion. Doctors told the anguished parents that within
the next 10 years they would watch their sons deteriorate, suffer greatly and
die.
“It was such a shock, so devastating for our children and for
us,” Ken said. “It was just unbelievable because I felt like our kids
were on the brink of living normal lives and the reality was their lives had
been turned upside down one more time.”
Each of the sons, however, dealt with the news in a way that was
unique to his own personality.
Dan, a 16-year-old freshman at St. Pius X High School in Atlanta,
was devastated at the news. He tried to kill himself with an overdose of
aspirin, and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for observation. Dan, who
Nancy describes as more like herself, wanted people to know about his disease.
“What had pushed him over the edge was not that he had the disease,”
Nancy said. “It was the fact that people in 1988 didn’t talk about
the AIDS virus.”
After several weeks in the hospital and with the support and
assistance of the St. Pius administration, Dan decided to tell his fellow
classmates that he was infected with the virus. Nancy was especially concerned
about what that would mean for Dan.
“I admired him beyond words for what he was doing, but I
warned him that once he told his classmates, they may not want to be around him
because they might not completely understand the medical facts,” she said.
“He was carrying a fatal virus that people were afraid they could get
through any sort of interaction. But he told me this was something he had to
do.”
Dan accepted the repercussions of telling others he had AIDS.
“There were rumors circulating throughout the school that Dan
was gay,” Ken said. “When kids in high school begin to gossip you
never know what story may be manufactured. I was so proud that my son had the
guts and fortitude to stand up and speak the truth without bitterness and
without anger.”
Nancy said that once Dan told his classmates they rallied around
him. “Every person in that class looked out for Dan,” she said.
“Classmates, the faculty and administration became a second family to him
by accepting him unconditionally.”
By sharing news of his condition, Dan found support from the St.
Pius community.
“That meant everything to him,” Ken said. “Those
kids looked out for him as long as he was a student at Pius.”
When 23-year-old Ron learned three weeks after his brother was
diagnosed with AIDS that he, too, was HIV positive, he was in the midst of
preparing for his wedding, less than three weeks away. When he told his
fiancee, they decided to continue with their wedding plans because they viewed
their time together as both precious and limited. The couple chose to tell no
one outside of the immediate family.
“Each of our sons had to deal with it in his own way,”
Nancy said. “There wasn’t a right or a wrong way to do this. Each had
to do what he felt was best in the circumstances.”
The HIV diagnosis meant another dramatic change for Nancy and Ken.
Nancy said she realized immediately that she was being asked to stand
helplessly at the foot of the bed and watch her sons suffer on a journey home
to the Lord.
“I prayed to Mary and slowly realized the parallels between
my situation and hers,” Nancy said. “Mary watched from a hillside as
her beloved Son was crucified for something He did not do. Like her, I was
going to see my sons suffer and die for something for which they were not
responsible. After that it was all easier for me to deal with because I knew
the Mother of God had already done what I was being asked to do.”
Ken discovered another insight as a result of his sons’
diagnoses.
“For me, it became the moment when I realized that my
children didn’t belong to me, they belonged to Christ,” Ken said.
“He had loaned them to me for a few years and it was my sole duty to
prepare them to go back to the Lord.”
Still, Nancy, Ken, and other family members, agonized as they
stood alongside Dan and Ron in the last years of their lives.
Dan was cared for by his parents, his brother Ron, and his four
sisters. A six-foot two-inch strapping man of 23, Dan fought diarrhea, loss of
balance, headaches, fatigue and endured the fusion of two ankles during his
battle with the virus. He also had a painful lesion on his body that bled
non-stop. Nancy cleaned the wound for him on a daily basis.
“It killed me a little every day to see him suffer so,”
she said. “There is nothing more painful for parents than to see their
child suffer and not be able to do anything.”
Ken also watched and did what he could as his son’s condition
deteriorated.
“It is an excruciating process to watch,” Ken said.
“You feel so helpless and, given our circumstances, we knew we were going
to go through this process again with our other son.”
But both affirmed God would take care of everything.
In January of 1995 Dan became paralyzed and lost control of all
his bodily functions. He died peacefully Feb. 16, 1995, surrounded by his
mother, father, sisters and brother at his parents’ home.
“Dan’s death devastated me,” Nancy said. “I
was his primary caregiver. We went through the whole thing from beginning to
end together. Sometimes I still think I can hear him calling me in the middle
of the night.”
Nancy and Ken said they found comfort in Dan’s peaceful
passing.
“It was the most awesome thing we had ever experienced,”
Ken said. “As Dan died we could feel the Lord in our midst. His presence
filled the room. We never felt alone, we were surrounded by God’s
love.”
Ron continued to fight the virus privately, at first in his home
with his wife and their child, Joshua, trying to protect his parents from the
pain of watching a second son suffer and die.
But as the virus progressed, Ron became emaciated, lost all muscle
tone, endured pneumonia, bedsores and migraine headaches that lasted for weeks.
Three weeks before he died, Ron moved back to his parents’ home so his
mother could care for him 24 hours a day while his wife worked to support the
family. He died May 2, 1997, surrounded by his family.
“Ronnie’s death hurt deeply, but it didn’t
devastate me,” Nancy said. “When he got married, I gave part of him
away to a new life with his wife. We were able to share the pain of this death
with his wife and son.”
For Ken, Ron’s death was different.
“In Ron I could see myself,” Ken said. “He was a
spouse and a father of a son. I knew how hard it would be for me to say
good-bye to my family. I could see how in his dying days he was trying to make
sure that the future of his wife and son were secure. I saw him struggle
through these very tough decisions and watched him say good-bye to his wife and
son. It was heart wrenching for me.”
When many in the world would ask, “Where was God and what did
He do for you,” the Proctors are the first to proclaim God did take care
of everything.
To be able to care for their sons and love them through their
illnesses was a privilege that had magnificent purpose to it. To be with them
when they died was a gift from God, the parents said.
“The process of dying can be a very beautiful one,”
Nancy said. “God was very good to us. He let us know when it was going to
happen. I am thankful that we were there with each one of our sons as he took
his final breath.”
“When someone is killed suddenly, you don’t have the
chance to say good-bye,” Nancy said. “You don’t know if he is at
peace with the Lord and those people around him. We had the opportunity to say
good-bye to each of our sons.”
Ken also recalled the blessings he experienced in their sons’
final moments of life.
“We got to pray with them, to kiss them good-bye and hold
their hands as they began their new life with God,” Ken said. “We
mourn their loss, and sometimes we are jealous that they are with God instead
of us. But we are also thankful that the suffering is over and grateful for the
opportunity that we had to say good-bye.”
For the Proctors, their journey with their sons was a mission, one
that ended well.
Nancy said she began the grieving process when her sons were
diagnosed with AIDS.
“When they died, we did not experience any shock,” she
said. “We had watched them die over several years. We saw them
deteriorate, and we saw their suffering. The shock was not in the death. We
actually were able to find peace in death because we knew their suffering was
over,” she said.
The time spent with their sons is now only a memory.
“I still often look at photos or some of their mementos and
miss them terribly,” Ken said. “But they have earned their
reward.”
Suffering, like the Proctors experienced, has had a profound
effect on the entire family.
“One of two things can happen when your family is confronted
with this kind of ordeal,” Nancy said. “You can split apart, or you
can grow closer together. We, with the help of God, became closer.”
The Proctor family continues to benefit from the past through
which they have lived.
“Our relationship with each other and our daughters grows
stronger every day,” Ken said. “We talk on a different level than
most parents and children. Our first priority is to talk to our daughters about
their walk with the Lord. For we have learned that time is precious and we do
not know how long we will have with each of our children. As parents this is
our focus. Everything else is secondary.”
But the best aspect of the Christian faith is what the
resurrection teaches us, the Proctors affirmed.
“Someday we will be reunited with our sons in heaven.”
God truly does take care of everything. |
