A white bungalow on the edge of the city is where my son, Walker, lives now.
I was out there the other day, but I can see it in my mind. I think about it all the time since he moved there, two years ago.
Wider than it is long. Ramp to the door. Always at least one car in the driveway. Strip mall on the corner. Names of the kids painted on the patio door.
It's first-rate, as assisted-living homes go: well-organized, well-staffed (the 24-hour care Walker needs, even asleep). He lives there with seven other handicapped children.
I know his bedroom by heart: blue-green walls, needs another window. But neat. Blond wood chest of drawers. Stickers of soccer balls on the walls. NASCAR bedspreads! Three of them share it: my lad Walker (cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome, CFC, a rare genetic mutation that leaves him, at 11, with the mind of a one-year-old and the body of a seven-year-old, incapable of speech); Marcus (deaf, delayed, anxious, but lively); Yosuf (tall, skinny, delayed, decomposing skeletal strength, sweet and quiet - he always shakes my hand).
Picture of Hayley, Walker's older sister, on the wall. Picture of Olga, our nanny. Picture of his Ma. Picture of me.
The closet, military in its order. Bins, labelled: shirts, pants, underpants, spare arm tubes (to keep him from smashing his head with his fists, as he is prone to do). A picture of a snowman. A pair of boxing gloves, traced on purple paper.
I went out to fetch him after school, to bring him home for a few days. (Did I tell you? He lives there now.)
I arrived early, before Walker was back from school. The house was still, overcast quiet. Seven people in the living room - Jasmine, Colin, Yosuf, Tharsika, Cindy and Karen, with Marcus watching TV with the volume off - and not a sound to be heard. None of them can speak. They were lost in their helmets and wheelchairs and their private minds.
Walker's little bus arrived. I ran out to meet him. "Hello, Beagle!" I said. To my surprise, he jumped into my arms for a hug. For all the times I've picked him up, I'm never sure he'll remember me. He always does, but I'm never certain.
I gave him a hell of a squeeze back.
And then, while we gathered his pump and his formula and his meds and his snow pants and his schoolbag and his arm cans and his foam helmet (I forgot the stroller), he wandered into the living room.
None of the others said hello, but, then, neither could he. He went straight to the Christmas tree instead, in his deliberate way. To examine the ornaments. In that house of eternal silence, he alone seemed drawn to brightness. I haven't been able to forget that. We left quickly. He loves the snow. Everything he likes is so important to me.
What I worry about is the future. If I can prove Walker's broken presence is essential to the world, maybe someone will protect him when I'm no longer here to do so.
One night last fall, for instance, I took my 14-year-old daughter, Hayley, to the ballet. She's a dancer herself; it's my favourite evening out - I wear a bow tie and she wears a dress. Jerome Robbins had choreographed music by Philip Glass: row after row of evenly spaced dancers, pacing across the stage in identical time to Mr. Glass's rhythmic score. Only an occasional couple broke step to perform a pas de deux.
A ballet about the life of a great city, in other words, with its armies of people doing the same things in the same impersonal place to the same rhythms - save when they break away from the pack and just as quickly slip back into position. A work of art that lets you see the crisp shape of your own existence, even while you are immersed in your repetitive, blinkered life. A generous, hopeful gesture. It brought thick tears to my eyes.
Walker makes people cry too. It can happen any time and to almost everyone who meets him, eventually.
They aren't tears of loss, or pity. I think they're tears of gratitude.
The handicapped remind us how dark life can be - every life, not just the handicapped ones. Born out of darkness, to head immediately toward that other darkness, with only a blink of light between. That was how Samuel Beckett put it. Most of his characters are legless, or confined, or without reason for hope.
So when Walker does anything to suggest there's a point to his life besides pain and isolation, it seems particularly brave. For a boy like Walker, an ornament on a Christmas tree is like the ark of the covenant. Even if my son is trying not to succumb to pain, and suddenly finds it bigger than him, and is stricken with grief at his defeat, at least he had hopes of beating it. There's a cup of grog for the undefeated, as a friend recently put it.
I think that's what the weeping is about. Walker has the same effect as the ballet: They both can reveal the larger shape of the world.
So to anyone who wonders about the potential value of a handicapped child, and the possible meaning of a penumbral life passed mostly in pain, that's one possibility. What if Walker's life is a work of art in progress - possibly a collective one? Would that persuade you to take care of him for me?
He's also a work of science. Out in California, at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California at San Francisco, a geneticist named Katherine Rauen spent seven years teasing apart the DNA of children with CFC, to find the gene that caused it. In January of 2006, nearly 30 years after the syndrome had first been described, she published her findings. There are three billion base pairs of nucleotides in the human chromosomes, which in turn comprise about 25,000 protein-forming genes (and a lot more besides). The mutations that cause CFC only happen for certain in three genes: BRAF, MEK1, MEK2.
They sounded like newly discovered planets to me, as baffling and rarefied as genetics itself. The gene labs at the Comprehensive Cancer Center were lit like the inside of a refrigerator and cluttered with textbooks and tubes and stoppers and scales and micro-array scanners. The scientific papers the geneticists wrote - largely for one another - had titles such as Keratosis pilaris/ulerythema ophryogenes and 18p deletion: Is it possible that the LAMA1 gene is involved? The geneticists themselves bore the slightly startled air of soldiers who had just emerged from deep jungle, only to be told that the war had been over for 20 years. They were fond of unusual, non-human screensavers: a photograph of a cat, say, asleep in a tiny log-cabin cathouse.
One afternoon, I stepped into an elevator full of young geneticists leaving work for the day. It was Halloween. Two of the female geneticists in the elevator were wearing devil horns on their heads. "Going out tonight?" one of the guys ventured. The women shook their heads no. I can't say I was surprised.
It was all very interesting, but I wanted to know what had gone wrong in my son. I remember the moment Dr. Rauen told me. It was getting on toward dinner and, outside, San Francisco was washed in its standard end-of-day golden light.
"This missense mutation" - the one that causes CFC - "is one letter [nucleotide]change in the entire gene," she said. "Yup. One letter in the entire gene, which causes one amino acid to change - one amino acid, one tiny building block of the entire protein. That's what causes CFC." That brief slip had caused the snaggle of Walker's life.
"And does anyone know why that letter changes?" I asked.
"DNA replicates, but it doesn't replicate with extremely high fidelity. If it replicated and never made a mistake, we would all look the same, right? The good news and the bad news is, if it does make a mistake, it makes a mistake about once every million times. One in every one million base pairs has got a mistake in it. Now, you've got all kinds of proteins and enzymes and stuff that go back and try to find this mistake. So a lot of mistakes you never know about. But sometimes the mistake's not corrected. And when that mistake's not corrected, it causes a change in protein."
Dr. Rauen took a breath and continued. "And that protein behaviour might make our immune system better. It might make our muscles stronger. It could have beneficial effects called evolution. You know, survival of the fittest. But you can have a genetic change that makes a deleterious effect, where it causes a hole in the heart, it causes your immune system to be weak. It might be a beneficial effect, it might be a deleterious effect."
Walker was a deleterious effect. Dr. Rauen didn't put it that way, of course. Indeed, she hurried to assure me that children such as Walker would have enormous value to medicine: Though the CFC genes are found in a cancer-causing protein pathway, CFC children seem not to get cancer.
"We are going to learn so much from these kids," she said. "We are going to learn how to treat them better from knowing their genes. We are going to learn how to care for them better. We are going to learn about cancer from these children. This is a huge discovery on multiple levels."
I thanked Kate Rauen shortly after that, left her office, crossed the street and sat down on a bench to think about what she had said.
The scientific definition of evolutionary success, of a successful random mutation, is one that allows the organism to survive and reproduce. Nature alone would not have allowed Walker to survive. He was an unsuccessful random human mutation.
But Walker wasn't a product of nature alone. He was also a product of modern medical technology - drugs, a feeding tube and more drugs. If Dr. Rauen is right and children with Walker's class of syndromes help to unriddle the causes of cancer, he'll be a success - not of evolution, but of medical evolution. It was something, anyway.
I looked up then and discovered I was sitting in front of a sculpture: Regardless of History, by an English artist named Bill Woodrow. It was seven feet high and bronze - a thin tree, blighted and leafless, stunted and growing out of a rock. But growing.
For weeks after, I resented the very idea of genetics. I didn't resent Kate Rauen - her isolation of the genes associated with CFC makes the syndrome easier to diagnose, which means therapies can begin sooner. But the hype around genetics doesn't match its reality. The possibility of a genetic cure for the symptoms of CFC is generations away, even by Dr. Rauen's estimate; and no other doctor I ever met believed that the CFC gene would play much of a role in curing cancer.
"The human genome is an elegant but cryptic store of information," Roderick McInnes told me one afternoon. He's the director of genetics at the Canadian Institute for Health Research. Sickle-cell anemia, he pointed out, was the first "genetic" or molecular disease to be identified, in 1949. Nearly 60 years later, there is still no cure.
You will forgive my pride, I hope: I just didn't like the idea of my son's life reduced to a typing error in a three-billion-long chain of letters, to one dinky nucleotide. The absolutism of genetics offended me. Eventually I came across some prominent geneticists who feel the same way. Craig Venter, who helped to create the Human Genome Project, the only human whose genome has been sequenced fully, says as much in his biography, A Life Decoded. "Genes did not make us, body and mind," he writes.
At the University of Oxford, a renowned gene man named Denis Noble - the author of The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome - went even further. "The social and ethical implications of understanding a human being from mere genes up are profound," he told me over the telephone from Oxford one morning - he had a fantastic accent, one of those cosmically articulate English jobs. "It does seem to me that one of the main effects to have emerged since the bottom-up appeal of genetic science is that, to the extent it unravels the human body, it dehumanizes it."
As for the mind - the strange wisp I've looked for in my boy, to only sporadic avail - Dr. Noble maintained that it had nothing to do with genes. "At the level of nerve cells and associated molecules," he said, "the mind isn't there. You can't even understand the idea of intentionality without the social networks we exist in, without communication with each other. I think we'll find that the mind lies outside the body, in the networks of social and cultural life."
He preferred the vision of "the Buddhists and the Taoists, who had this notion that the mind was not an object. It was a process."
Dr. McInnes made me see that my problem wasn't with genetics, but with the nature of genetic disease. "There's something about genetic disease and kids," he said. "It's the permanent nature of it, the emotions associated with a mutation: Once you've got it, you've got it. Other diseases, you don't have them for life. I guess it's the inexorable nature of genetic disease that makes it striking. The blueprint's been changed."
And Walker's mind? That is truly unfixable. "The brain has 20 billion neurons," Dr. McInnes said. "Each neuron makes 1,000 contacts and is touched by another 10,000. We're probably never going to understand the brain at the level of individual neurons. We'll probably have to look at it the way astrophysicists approach understanding a billion stars."
That, I find strangely comforting: Lying on my back, gazing up at the random sparkles of Walker's mind and speculating. And crying, of course. Always the fucking crying.
I keep talking to him. I don't assume he understands much, but I do it anyway. Somehow, I hope, the words will rouse him. But of course it's not Walker who needs to keep hearing me talk; it's me who needs to keep talking to Walker. I'm afraid of what will happen if I stop. I keep thinking of that scene at the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, when the father is dying and the boy knows it.
You said you wouldn't ever leave me.
I know. I'm sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You're the best guy. You always were. If I'm not here, you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I'll talk to you. You'll see.
Will I hear you?
Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you'll hear me. You have to practise. Just don't give up. Okay?
Okay.
Okay.
When I talked to other parents of CFC children, they sometimes said surprising things. Eddie Santa Cruz in California cried non-stop when he talked about how happy his daughter, Emily, made him. She let him feel things. A woman in Washington, D.C., said of her CFC daughter, "She loves hot dogs, she loves anything with ranch dressing, and waffles." In the same breath, she said, "She has an incredible memory." These parents seldom complain, but they share a sense of foreboding.
In Vancouver, Fergus and Bernice McCann have raised their daughter, Melissa, for more than 20 years, virtually on their own. Fergus spent his retirement savings to buy a house for Melissa to live in for the rest of her life, but Bernice found it hard to be hopeful. "There is little laughter in this home," she told me one evening. "Our boys laugh, but they're not carefree. Sense of humour - Ferg used to have one, but it's pretty much gone. Our boys are 20 and 22. When they were 18, they were changing Melissa's menstrual pads. What 18-year-old should be doing that?" The problem was, no one else had offered to do it.
In Saskatoon, Julia Woodsworth lives with her mother, Pam, and father, Eric. Pam is 52. Julia is 19, has CFC and is incapable of living alone. She has to wait three years to get a dental appointment. "I feel like at every stage of Julia's life we've had to be trailblazers," Pam said. "But I haven't found there's been a real growth in some of the options where people with disabilities are concerned."
It is hard to ask for society's help, but it's impossible not to. "The model we're given is this idea of mainstreaming," Linda Pruessen said one day at lunch in Toronto. Her sister, Caroline, is globally delayed and in her 30s. She still lives at home with her parents, who are both 63. For them, arranging to see a movie on a Friday night is like planning a two-week vacation. "The idea is, get the person into the community. But that breaks down at some point. Because my sister is never going to be able to be part of the community. It's noticeable, for instance, that she's physically different. If you take her into a hair salon, she's going to get looks. Is that fair to her? Is it not reasonable to expect her to be able to get a haircut without weird looks? And who should monitor and adjust her quality of life? Do we trust the government?"
These are excellent questions. None of them, as yet, has an answer.
One afternoon, I visited a doctor at a famous children's hospital. She wanted to explain how doctors decide to save a sick child, even when they know its life will be compromised later on. The question had troubled me for years. Had there ever been a point in Walker's infancy when the doctors realized how hard his life would be? If so, they never mentioned it.
The doctor was an infant transplant surgeon; she knew life and death at first brace. Her hospital saved the lives of preemies born at 23 weeks gestation. The media called them miracles, but 80 per cent developed serious intellectual handicaps.
Ten minutes into our conversation, I noticed the doctor was crying. Maybe it had been a long day. "If we spend a million dollars when they're 24 weeks to save them," she said, blowing her nose, "then we have to spend the same amount when they are bigger. But when they're discharged, we ignore them."
I asked her why she was weeping. She said: "Because you see it all the time."
Walker was saved by medical technology. I am grateful, but under my gratitude lurks a terrifying question: What would have happened if nature had been left to take its course? We saved his life, but is it a life he finds worth living?
Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer asphyxiated his 12-year-old daughter, Tracy, in 1993. She was a 40-pound quadriplegic with the mind of a four-month-old infant. She suffered from excruciatingly painful cerebral palsy, and had three surgeries in 10 years to reform her legs and spine; a fourth surgery was planned to remove the top quarter of her right thigh. Because her parents refused the surgical installation of a feeding tube, she could take nothing stronger than Tylenol for pain, for fear her breathing would stop. Her father couldn't bear to see her in agony any longer. He was sentenced to life for second-degree murder. The court cited the fact that Tracy liked the circus and smiled when the horses trotted by, as proof that the value of her life outweighed the burden of her pain. I remember reading this after Mr. Latimer appealed his conviction and thinking: She smiled when the horses trotted by? Big fucking deal.
There is no excuse for murder. But there have been nights, after hours of trying to stop Walker from smashing his head, when I imagined I understood Mr. Latimer's desperate reasoning. Medicine had kept his daughter alive, but 90 per cent of her life was agony. How much of her parents' lives had been shaved away, witnessing that pain? If you added the losses up, it wasn't long before the equivalent of several healthy lives were draining away to mind one hopelessly broken girl. Mr. Latimer cut his family's losses and put Tracy out of her pain. So I explained it to myself. It was murder, illegal and unconscionable. But the logic was no more pathological than a crop rotation. Why did he feel he didn't have a choice?
"I think, as a family, I have a lot of empathy for the Latimers," Pam Woodsworth told me from Saskatoon, on the day last week that the National Parole Board denied Mr. Latimer's application for day parole. "The big remaining question for me is, why isn't our province on trial? What he did was an act of despair. That family wasn't getting the support they needed. I'm really interested in how, as members of a civil society, we're all complicit in Tracy's death."
Now that the Ontario government is keen to be seen to be eliminating surgical waiting times, if I want a new knee to ski better, I can have one in six months. If I know the right doctor, I can probably have it in two weeks. Why did it take seven years of looking and asking and begging to find a decent place where my son would be adequately cared for? And Ontario is a progressive province where the handicapped are concerned.
I want to blame the doctors, but what choice did they have? Bruce Blumberg, one of the first geneticists to identify CFC syndrome, has counselled parents on genetic dilemmas at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Oakland, Calif., for 30 years. With the parent of a sick child, who has likely been riding the Internet all night and is full of fear, "more often than not, to achieve a balance point, I need to emphasize the positive. At the same time, the parents are keen to hope. And it's easier to be positive. It's easier to smile. I've been through stuff with patients. It's hard. So I think for doctors it's avoidance at times."
But then why leave parents with a child no one can care for on their own?
The problem, Dr. Blumberg said, lies in our unwillingness to accept that a handicapped life has real value, especially if the value is subtle and hard to quantify. "Families often do find raising a handicapped child a gift, despite the hardship," he said. "It creates new relationships, reveals new capabilities. The trick is to give up the idea of the potential child and accept the actual child."
Dr. Blumberg is familiar with medical catastrophe. He was blinded in one eye as a boy while helping his father spread fertilizer. He went on to become a doctor via some of the best universities in the world. "It's arrogant of us to assume that these states are inferior to the normal state," he said.
"If you have an IQ of 60, that's a serious handicap in our society. But if you're a migrant farm worker, it might be fine, plenty. So who is to say that the state of non-verbal rapture you describe in your son - who is to say that that is inferior? Who is to say that? We're arrogant enough to believe that sentience is all that counts. It's not all that counts. A sequoia is not a sentient being. But they count. There is nothing more magnificent. It doesn't require me to think about it to be in awe of it. I don't want to minimize the difficulty of raising a handicapped child. It says something about the place we have reached as a society that doing so creates a serious handicap in these contexts. But it's just a mistake to think of them as lesser than. There's no lesser than. There's just different from. It isn't just great minds that matter. It's great spirits too."
The biggest challenge, I find, is to be optimistic. Not about Walker - he takes care of that - but about his future. The longer I spend in the world of my son's disability, the more people I meet who rise to that challenge. They are some of the most impressive people I've ever encountered.
Shelly Greenhaw might be one of them. She lives in Oklahoma City, and has one of those terrific wide-open Oklahoma accents, voice as clear as a plain. Shelly's early life had been full of charms: She played varsity softball in college ("I started out in left field, but by junior year I was a catcher") and was Miss Congeniality in the 1995 Miss Teen America pageant. And then five years ago, she gave birth to Kinely, who has cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome, like Walker. A year later, Kamden was born, with what looked like an autism-spectrum disorder.
She started life all over again - the kind of personal renewal most people dread. But it worked. "I'm excited to see what's in store for my girls," she said. "And kind of, how they're going to brush up against others." She is a Christian - that helps. She works hard to stay positive and campaigns against the word retarded. Lots of kids, she said, have a rougher road than hers do.
"I just feel real lucky that we have a walker and a talker. Having the girls has changed the way I communicate, changed the way I treat people. Life doesn't scare me any more. I don't fear the unknown."
Nowadays, she said, every time she sees someone in a wheelchair in the mall, she wants to run up and hug them, a notion that flabbergasts me. But she admitted that she has her dark days too. "I have my moments. I wish I knew why. Because my little girls are the greatest example of selflessness and good nature that I know. And yet at the same time I feel a deep sense of loss for them ... that some of their hopes may be crushed. That they won't experience the same kind of acceptance we've given them."
The light they threw on her life and the darkness that hovered around them went hand in hand. Lately, Shelly said, she has been thinking that Kinely can get married, have a husband. "I'd never even considered a partner for Kinely," she said. "I was thinking too small. But now I think really big for them." (I should have given her Walker's number.)
But the international arc lamp of optimism is France's Jean Vanier. The first time he visited an institution for the intellectually disabled in the early 1960s, he immediately heard their "cry for friendship and relationship." Mr. Vanier - the son of former Canadian governor-general Georges Vanier - is the founder of L'Arche, a series of communities for the disabled that now reaches around the world. He's the world's foremost thinker and philosopher on the rights of the disabled.
"I realized instinctually," he has written of that first encounter, "that what they needed most was a family environment, a place of belonging where they could be themselves, grow in inner confidence and freedom, and enjoy life with others."
Mr. Vanier is a radical. He is not, for instance, a supporter of integration, the current educational orthodoxy that the handicapped should live within the normal community, as pretend normals. He insists instead on the right of the handicapped to live apart, on "the children's right to be different, to be separate from their parents, to be free to be whoever they want to be." Instead of integrating the handicapped into the normal world, he calls for the able-bodied to be integrated into the world of the handicapped, to live among them - because that way, we will learn more.
This is the model Walker's new home operates on. Every time we meet someone who is severely handicapped, Mr. Vanier believes, they ask a question: Do you consider me human? Do you love me? Our answers define not only who we are, but how human we want to be.
The more we meet the handicapped on their own ground, rather than our own, Mr. Vanier says, the more we evolve. We begin in fear of their appearance and behaviour; move on through pity; pass through the stage where we help them and respect them, but still see them as lesser beings; until finally we experience "wonderment and thanksgiving," and "discover that, by becoming close to disabled people and entering an authentic relationship with them, they transform us. They help us to move from the personal desire for success and power to a desire to be with those who are weak and help them to be just as they are, knowing that we receive as much or even more than we give."
In the last and highest stage, "we see the face of God within the disabled. Their presence is a sign of God, who has chosen 'the foolish in order to confound the strong, the proud and the so-called wise of our world.' And so those we see as weak or marginalized are, in fact, the most worthy and powerful among us: They bring us closer to God."
I can't begin to describe the extent of my admiration for Jean Vanier, the originality and bravery of his stance, the selflessness of his work on behalf of people exactly like my son. I think his model for communities of the handicapped is without peer.
I only wish I could believe in his God as well. Because the truth is, I do not see the face of the Almighty in Walker, and it would demean him to try. Instead, I see humanity, the face of my boy. Walker is no saint and neither am I. I can't bear to watch him bash himself every day, but I can try to understand why he does it. The more I struggle to face my limitations as a father, the less I want to trade him. Not just because we have a physical bond, a big simple thing; not just because he's taught me the difference between a real problem and a mere complaint; not just because he makes me more serious, makes me appreciate time and Hayley and my wife and friends, and all the sweetness that one day ebbs away. I have begun simply to love him as he is, because I've discovered I can; because we can be who we are, weary dad and broken boy, without alteration or apology, in the here and now. There is no planning with this boy. I go where he goes.
The face of God? Sorry, no. More like a mirror, reflecting everything back, my choices included. For me - this is the best I can think of him, the way I most want to think of him - Walker is like the vessel Wallace Stevens wrote about:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
I realize it's not much to go on, not much of a light to see by. It easily wavers. But it's the best I can do.
Not long ago, I had a dream about Walker. He was in his new house and I was visiting. He was very, very, very happy: He still couldn't speak, but he understood everything and could instantly convey all he wanted to say, in murmurs. After our visit, he walked me to the door of his house to say goodbye, and stood there, beaming. His housemate Chantal, or his other friend Christa Lee, or some combination of the two, was behind him. It was clear she was his girlfriend. That pleased me: I knew he had finally found someone to love and someone to love him, not just in the public way everyone loves Walker, but in a way only he could understand - his own private love, at last, to give and receive. And he loved me, and I loved him, and we both knew it. He smiled as I said goodbye, and gave me his blessing. He had forgiven me for his life. But in the end it was just a dream.
Ian Brown is a Globe and Mail feature writer.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
People with rare "orphan" syndromes and other complex conditions challenge medicine's organizational limits and procedures. For this reason, supporters of Walker Brown's long-time pediatrician (who died in March of colon cancer) came together in 2006 to create the Dr. Norman Saunders Initiative in Complex Care at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, with the aim of developing comprehensive care for such children.
To learn how you can help, contact Arlene Manankil at 416-813-8742 or by e-mail at . Or visit .
THE BOY IN THE MOON THE SERIES
Saturday, Dec. 1
Part 1: The Unexpected Son
Ian Brown relates the intimate
experience of life with Walker - the story of his diagnosis and the epic of his care.
Saturday, Dec. 8
Part 2: Finding Walker's Place
The long search for a facility that could help Walker, and a long drive to meet other CFC families across the continent.
This week
Part 3: My Son, My Teacher