A New Life for a Reason
Published: September 4, 2003
It’s been how long? Elba Cruz Schulman asks Erroll Massop. Ten, 12 years? You look the same, he says. You, too. Actually, I think I’m getting younger, he jokes.
Cruz Schulman thought of the Massop family often through the years. When you spend more than two decades as a social worker, some people stay with you: the woman who needed her electricity turned back on for her daughter’s respirator; the girl who gave up her adolescence to help care for her disabled brother.
And Claude Massop, the little boy with the sweet eyes who had undergone two heart surgeries by the time she met the family, who wasn’t supposed to live past his fourth birthday.
Claude’s father, Erroll, needed help paying the hospital bills. He had a job. He’d had one pretty much since the day he arrived from Jamaica - first at Kentucky Fried Chicken making $4 an hour, then at Sealtest making $9. But his medical insurance didn’t cover all the bills. His wife, Meggan, had stopped working to care for Claude, who would cry through the night, and their five other children. And now the creditors were calling.
Still, Cruz Schulman had to persuade Massop to apply for assistance. “It’s not charity,” she told him. He accepted food stamps, but only for a while.
He was so proud, she remembers, so stubborn. When doctors told him his son had no chance of living, he sought second and third opinions. A doctor in New York wouldn’t accept the $300 for tests performed on Claude because he couldn’t help him, but Massop wouldn’t budge from the office.
“What am I to do?” he asked. “I have nowhere else to go, and I cannot let my son die.” The doctor sent him to a colleague at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. If Claude was strong enough after nine days, doctors there said, he’d be placed on the heart transplant list.
Massop slept on a cot near his son. He washed his clothes in a sink late at night, dried them by a vent, and prayed. Nine days later, the boy was placed on the list, and Massop was sent home with a beeper that would go off if they had a heart. It went off two weeks later.
“We have a heart,” they told him. He jumped in his car, pushing the needle past 85, and made it to Manhattan in the middle of the day in an hour and a half.
Cruz Schulman launched a fund-raiser to help with the bills - not exactly in her job description, although try to convince her of that. “They needed my help,” she says simply.
People donated money and sent letters; Cruz Schulman brought the letters with her Tuesday after a chance encounter with the family’s former pastor reunited them. Claude sat on the couch in the family’s Bloomfield home reading them as though they were about a stranger.
“I don’t have much,” one letter read, “but I don’t mind donating the little I can scrounge up for the benefit of this little boy.”
Claude doesn’t remember. Except for the medication he will take for the rest of his life, he’s a typical 16-year-old. He plays basketball and video games, and would rather be in the kitchen eating the pizza that he and his little brother ordered after coaxing an extra three bucks from their father.
But Erroll Massop remembers: all the moments of despair and desperation, the people who told him to give up, and those who stood by him. His boss at Sealtest, who gave him $5,000 and visited the family at the hospital. And Elba Cruz Schulman, the woman who prayed with the family during one of their most vulnerable moments - the day they talked to a funeral director just in case Claude didn’t make it.
“Make no mistake,” he says, “God gave this child back to us.”
Massop, now a state correction officer, scoffs at the suggestion that perhaps it’s a luxury to worry about the English class that Claude failed last year - what’s an “F” compared with life and death?
If God saved his child, he says, the least he could do is have high expectations for him.
That’s why he hijacked Claude’s video games and locked them up in the trunk of his car. Rocket scientists - and he’s expecting nothing less from his son - shouldn’t waste time.
Claude’s not sure what he wants to be when he gets older, maybe a ball player, or a barber. He’s good at cutting hair, his mother says. His father protests. A barber? Oh, he doesn’t think so. Unless, of course, Claude wants to be a rocket scientist who also happens to cut hair.
“I guess that would be OK then,” Massop says.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: