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The world saw Pope Francis bless a boy with cerebral palsy. Here’s what we
didn’t see.
By Julie Zauzmer October 12 at 6:20 PM
Kristin
Keating shares a moment with son Michael, 10, as his twin brother,
Chris, plays with their dog Shiloh at their home 50 miles west of
Philadelphia. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
ELVERSON, Pa.
— It’s been nine days since their family’s sudden moment of grace. Nine
days since Pope Francis laid his hands on their 10-year-old son.
And
now it’s 6 a.m. on a Monday, and Chuck Keating is laying his own hands
on Michael’s body. Chuck soothes his boy, whose limbs are stiff from
severe cerebral palsy, so he can gently roll Michael over in bed to
change his diaper.
“Buddy, relax,” Chuck murmurs. “Relax. Relax.”
Michael, one thin arm outstretched, starts moaning.
The
Keatings’ lives are defined by moments like this one, when it’s not
even dawn yet, and Michael’s feeding-tube monitor is beeping, and his
twin brother, Chris, is inventing his own smoothie recipe in the
kitchen, and older sister Katie is trying to find her field hockey gear.
Their days unfold under the gaze of dozens of Elmo dolls, because
Michael can see the color red best, and under the wooden cross above his
bed, and under the words on his bedroom wall: “Everyday holds a
possibility of a miracle.”
A miracle — they always believed in it. And then they got one.
Pope Francis stops his car to bless a child in a wheelchairPlay Video2:50
After
arriving in Philadelphia on Sept. 26, Pope Francis asked his driver to
stop his car so he could kiss and bless Michael. (Reuters)
Michael’s moment
They
almost didn’t bring Michael. Church officials had picked the band at
Bishop Shanahan High School, where Chuck is the band leader, to play at
Philadelphia International Airport to welcome Pope Francis on Sept. 26.
Chuck, 45, and his wife, Kristin, 43, lifelong Catholics who met in college,
were thrilled.
Kristin,
a fourth-grade public school teacher, planned to take Chris and Katie,
but she thought bringing Michael was out of the question.
The
lift on the family’s wheelchair-accessible van does not work anymore,
making it difficult to transport him. His body can get dangerously
overheated any time he is outside in hot weather. He needs to be
catheterized every four hours.
But then the family’s priest gave a homily at Mass about the many
Philadelphians who were vowing to leave town during the papal visit because of
road closures.
“He
said that people shouldn’t be going out of their way to avoid the pope,
they should be going out of their way to do what they can to be there,”
Chuck recalls.
He told Kristin: Let’s bring Michael.
So all five Keatings met the excited band in the Bishop Shanahan parking lot
at 3:45 a.m.
As
Francis stepped off the plane hours later, the band played the song
closest to Philadelphians’ hearts, “Gonna Fly Now” from the movie
“Rocky.”
Minutes later, the 78-year-old pontiff got into a
waiting car. It began to drive away — and then Francis spotted Michael.
He motioned to the driver to stop the black Fiat.
[Pope Francis saw a boy with cerebral palsy. This is what happened next.]
And
then suddenly 13-year-old Katie was taking video, and crying, as the
leader of their faith strode up to her brother, kissed his head and
uttered a blessing. Chuck was looking away, overcome by emotion, then
turning back to shake Francis’s hand. Ten-year-old Chris was putting his
hands to his head, thinking, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” Kristin
was squeezing the pope’s hand — “so soft” — and understanding only the
emotion, not the words Francis said in a language she does not speak.
Michael was raising his eyes at the moment of the pope’s kiss.
Katie
Keating, 13, shows a frame of the video she took when Pope Francis
kissed her brother Michael. She cried as she filmed it. (Ricky
Carioti/The Washington Post) Katie
wakes Michael early in the morning. Their mother, Kristin, put the
words on Michael’s bedroom wall, “Everyday holds a possibility of a
miracle.” (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
In an instant, the photos and videos were tearing across the world thanks to
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
But even as
the moment unfolded at the airport, reality intruded. As Kristin wiped
away tears and gave interviews, she had one urgent thought: “It’s been
four hours. Michael needs to be cathed. Now.”
On a tarmac far
from a bathroom, Kristin improvised a shield using a Bishop Shanahan
High School banner. Just a few feet away from the swarm of reporters,
she crouched unnoticed to catheterize her son.
Michael
looks on during class at the Child and Career Development Center almost
two weeks after being blessed by the pope. He has had cerebral palsy
since birth. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
‘Are you taking them?’
Kristin was in the Wegmans checkout line when her cellphone rang.
She
and Chuck, who’d struggled to have children, had already adopted once.
Katie, born in Texas, was a bubbly 2-year-old. Now they were awaiting
the birth of twin boys to a mother in Kansas to complete their family.
Then the call on Oct. 27, 2004: Your twins have been born.
“Wrong family,” Kristin said serenely in the grocery store. “Our twins are due
between Christmas and New Year’s.”
The
representative of the adoption agency explained that these were the
right twins, born at the wrong time. Michael was already moving into the
birth canal when the obstetrician realized that Chris was breach,
feet-first, the Keatings were later told. The doctor did an emergency
Caesarean section that left Michael severely injured.
“We need to know whether you’re taking them,” the adoption specialist said.
Kristin says she has never once questioned their decision to adopt Chris and
Michael.
Not
during those early weeks in Kansas, when Kristin and Chuck took turns
flying back and forth, trying to work, take care of their toddler
daughter and be there for their sons in neonatal intensive care. Not
when the boys were transferred to Pennsylvania, still so sick that each
required his own medical flight, and Michael’s lung collapsed during the
plane ride. Not when Chris was well enough to leave the hospital, but
Michael spent his first Christmas in intensive care. Not once, in all
the years that followed.
The Keatings count the surgeries — one
to insert Michael’s feeding tube port and one for the pump that
dispenses a muscle relaxer inside him, one to put a rod in his spine,
then one to put steel plates in his hips. They list the doctors they
must visit regularly — the neurologist for Michael’s seizures, the
urologist for his semiannual kidney scan, the gastrointestinal
specialist to calibrate what goes into his feeding tube.
They
number, too, all the times they are at a loss to comfort their other two
children when their brother is in danger or in pain: Katie, who flicks
her long blonde curls toward Michael when she gets out of the shower
because she knows the water will make him giggle; and Chris, who is
slight and wiry and dark-haired like his twin, but wears scuffed
sneakers while Michael’s are spotless neon blue, the shoes of a child
who will never run outdoors.
Michael
spends time in the kitchen as his mom, Kristin, cleans up from dinner
and his dad, Chuck, works on his laptop. They’ve never questioned their
decision to adopt Michael and his twin brother. (Ricky Carioti/The
Washington Post)
‘Michael is a teacher’
The Keatings believe in the power of prayer — even the ones that seem to go
unanswered.
Kristin prayed to get pregnant, through three failed rounds of in vitro
fertilization.
“I
was very down on everything, and just thinking that life didn’t seem
fair at the time,” she says. “When Katie was born, I just realized that
everything does happen for a reason. This is what was meant to be. ”
When
Chuck learned he would be a father to twin boys, he started imagining
backyard catches. “I have an infield now,” he thought.
Instead, he found himself learning to work his son’s feeding tube and to
administer an enema.
“Everyone
always wonders, why would God do this to one of his children? I
questioned that for a while,” Chuck says. But caring for Michael has
given him an answer.
“I think Michael is a teacher,” he says.
“Michael has taught me quite a bit about patience, love, the importance
of what a hug and a kiss means.”
At 10, Chris shares his father’s musical ear. He already plays six instruments
— drums, guitar, piano, trombone, trumpet and violin.
Michael shares a love of music, too. When Michael fusses, Chris grabs his
guitar to strum a few soothing chords beside his brother.
The
Keatings know Michael’s tastes — “Beauty and the Beast,” Mumford and
Sons and Bob Marley are among his favorites. One day, Michael started
screaming on the school bus. His nurse looked for anything that could be
hurting him, then checked what song was coming through his headphones.
He was listening to Justin Bieber. And he clearly wasn’t a fan.
When
Michael is in the hospital, Katie is the one to ask most often, “Are
you sure he’s not in pain?” Once, when a doctor said Michael would need
to stay at the hospital a day longer than planned, Katie, then 8,
demanded by phone, “Let me have a talk with that doctor.”
Someday, she wants to work with children who have disabilities in a school
like the one Michael attends.
“When he just smiles,” she says, “it makes me happy.”
Michael
is lifted onto his school bus outside the Keating home. His sister,
Katie, wants to work with children who have disabilities at a school
like Michael’s someday. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Communion denied
Caring
for Michael strains the Keatings emotionally, and also physically.
Kristin has had two hernia surgeries from lifting her 70-pound son and
his bulky wheelchair.
The burden is also financial: There’s the
mortgage on the wheelchair-accessible house they built, 50 miles west of
Philadelphia. The caregivers they hire to help, on days their insurance
plan won’t cover the cost. The $60,000 wheelchair-accessible van they
need that a cousin just started a donations Web page to fund.
[‘Stars Wars’ director JJ Abrams and others donate thousands to Keatings]
Years
after bringing Michael and Chris home, the Keatings learned that they
could have received a significant subsidy from the state of Kansas for
adopting a child with disabilities. They were told they never got their
check because they didn’t apply for the money until after they left the
state with the babies. They have tried to make their case for the money
in recent years but have not made much progress.
“We
and other parents like us are constantly fighting — whether it’s the
insurance company or the county or someone — for what Michael qualifies
for,” Kristin says.
Some fights are far more emotional.
When
Chris was ready for his first Holy Communion, in second grade, Kristin
and Chuck assumed the twins would receive their first Communion side by
side. Their parish priest said no: Because Michael could not recite his
first confession and could not swallow the wafer on his own, the priest
said he was not allowed to receive the sacrament.
“First penance?
I said, ‘The kid hasn’t sinned,’ ” Chuck recalls, still enraged at the
memory. “I said, ‘This is the last time you will see me in this church.
He’s a child of God.’ ”
The Keatings found a different parish,
St. Peter in West Brandywine, where the Rev. Michael J. Fitzpatrick had
insisted that the church built in 2007 include no stairs.
“That
needed to be our attitude about a lot of different things here — how do
you make everything accessible? That means sacraments, too,” Fitzpatrick
says.
Michael received his first Communion at St. Peter alongside Chris. Katie was
the one to hand her brothers the host.
“That was, we thought, the most special moment of our lives,” Kristin says.
Chuck
Keating kisses Chris before he heads off to work at Bishop Shanahan
High School, where he’s the band director. The band was chosen to play
during Pope Francis’s arrival in Philadelphia. (Ricky Carioti/The
Washington Post)
Every Sunday, the Keatings greet
Fitzpatrick at the door of the stair-free church and take their place
under the light of a round stained-glass window. When it comes time for
Communion, Michael goes first, pushed in his wheelchair by either Chuck
or Katie. Fitzpatrick administers a little bit of the wine from the
chalice through Michael’s feeding tube, using a syringe.
“There’s
a real peace and a joy that Michael seems to have each and every time,”
Fitzpatrick says. “I think we all perceive it as a moment that we’re in
awe of the presence of God, both in the precious blood and also in
Michael.”
The papal blessing has only added to that sense of awe
for those who know the Keatings. The family’s house has filled up with
pope-themed gifts — a Francis bobblehead, a Francis doll, a framed
drawing of the Holy Father, commemorative bracelet charms, Vatican
flags.
[‘Pope-apalooza’ inspires a flood of Francis bobbleheads, mugs, even beer]
Then there are the e-mails, from strangers writing to share their own
struggles raising children with disabilities.
“When
I saw the Holy Father bless your son, I couldn’t help but imagine him
blessing my Ryan,” one father of a 19-year-old with cerebral palsy wrote to the
Keatings. “It’s a hard battle. . . . Please remember, we’re never really alone.”
Kristin Keating helps Michael get ready for bed. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington
Post)
A miracle’s afterglow
A
week after the pope’s visit, Katie’s field hockey team comes in third
place in a tournament. Chris shows off his handmade “Minecraft”
characters. Michael starts his week with a recorded message from Chuck
in his backpack: “Yippidee dippidee doo! I love school!”
The glow of the miracle still permeates their home.
“Every time we look at Michael now, we see it,” Chuck says.
Kristin
agrees. “So many times we feel alone. People who love us, who care
about us — no one knows what we go through sometimes,” she says. “It’s
so scary, so much of the time. I get scared of the fact that people
don’t see — ” She breaks off, and Katie puts her head on her mother’s
knee.
“I feel like so many more people now are keeping him in
their prayers. When he goes into a surgery, he’s going to have people
praying for him,” Kristin says. “The pope kissed our son. He’s saying
that it’s going to be okay, and I’m here with you.”
They have
never been sure how much Michael understands of the world they strive to
create for him each day. Chuck believes he recognizes their voices.
Kristin believes he knows his own name.
But they are certain of
some things. Certain that Michael feels joy at his siblings’ caresses.
Certain that God hears their prayers for him. And certain that when
Francis blessed him, Michael smiled.
Julie Zauzmer is a local news reporter.
