Chandler family holds fast to the light of Christ

Jan underwent three abdominal surgeries and radiation treatment for cancer three years ago and has arthritis. Mike’s lower back is fused from surgeries from wounds suffered in Vietnam, where he was a prisoner of war for eight months. He recently had shoulder surgery and is awaiting more on the other shoulder. Their oldest daughter, Crystal, 33, suffered brain damage from a car crash in Tempe in 2001 and is tormented by pain, loss of hearing and concentration, and the end of careers in modeling and music. The family is working with the courts to give them legal relief, but Crystal’s medical recovery is far more daunting.

Their other daughter, Catrina, 30, and a friend have adopted a 17-month-old girl from a mother of nine who has a history of crack use.

“We certainly know what it is to pray and seek God,” said Jan, who grew up in the Mennonite church in Pennsylvania, near the school where a gunman fatally shot five girls, wounded five others and then killed himself on Oct. 2. The Amish community’s statements of forgiveness to the killer caught the world’s attention. That spirit of forgiveness and acceptance is a lot of what Jan Walsh is about.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

The flocked, 8-foot-tall Christmas tree in the living room is festooned with reminders of their 35-year marriage and raising their two daughters and their years together in Wyoming and Arizona. There are ornaments of the 12 days of Christmas, dancing shoes to remind them of Catrina’s footwork, a gingerbread house and a tiny piano that reminds them of when Crystal was playing Mozart before the accident.

Jan is a rush of stories of a woman who has gone headlong into life — a 46-year registered nurse who still talks of getting advanced degrees at 64, who recites long, inspirational poems that she wrote, who cries when she talks about what Mike endured in Vietnam. She speaks adoringly of her burly husband. “He’s an old redneck from Wyoming and cusses a blue streak, but he has a heart of gold,” she said. She raises her voice when she says she is on the policymaking committee of the Brain Injury Association of Arizona and intends to lobby the Legislature for justice for people like her daughter whose life was forever changed by a drunken driver who went to prison.

Jan became an accomplished singer at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. She calls herself a “dramatic soprano with a big range.”

“They told me I almost matched Julie Andrews,” she said. Her range spans almost four octaves, and it led to her singing with the Billy Graham Crusades and performing for Youth of Christ.

“I was dumb and green at 17,” said Jan, now an active United Methodist. “I graduated from Lancaster Mennonite High School, and I was the class poet, and they told me I would be a missionary, and I said I would, but not the way they thought. I have been all over the place, no doubt about it.” Her nursing has ranged from providing hospice care to obstetrics to school nursing to psychiatric care to doctor’s offices. “I spent my last months working on my nursing degree as a night supervisor in Kentucky and working in the hills and hollows helping deliver babies,” she said.

“This year, we don’t hurt so much,” said Jan as she patted a black cat on her lap. She said Christmas’ arrival brings rhythm and assurance. “I think of the Scripture, that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever right through all of that,” she said. The lights of the holidays, in all their forms, including the Jewish Festival of Lights, exemplify that hope, she said. “It is the beginning of our Savior’s life here on earth, and it stretches, of course, from the beginning of time until the crucifixion and the resurrection and ascension.”

It’s not a time, she said, to be defeated.

“We die down, but we rise again. We rise above what has been given to us,” she said, noting how she and Mike work with Crystal to have patience and perseverance in her recovery, that “you can’t get what you wish it was if you won’t look at what things are. I think she is learning that she has to do that.”

Utmost on their minds, however, is the upcoming accident lawsuit trial.

Yet they all draw from the survivor’s well of 58-year-old Mike’s Vietnam experience. As a soldier in an Army engineers unit, he cleared jungle for roads and bridges. In 1968, his group was attacked, and Mike was one of only five of the nearly 100 in the group to survive, she said. “He had the sense to drop the Caterpillar blade that he was driving and fall behind it when the shooting started,” she said, crying. “After about an hour of that, he lost his hearing and he just screamed, ‘God, stop the shooting,’ and he did just that. He was just too scared to come out for about another hour.” The rain stopped, “and the sun came through on all the dead and dying around him, and he was so scared.”

Mike came across a Buddhist shrine and prayed there and saw and heard angels, she said.

A nonbeliever at the time, Mike said he was later baptized in the South China Sea by a chaplain after an Army buddy told him he wouldn’t get to heaven without it. “The old chaplain was out there doing it when this wave came along and knocked us all around,” he said with a laugh.

After their marriage, Jan learned of Mike’s troubled boyhood, living with a father who beat him. Mike told Jan how he used to tend goats in Wyoming, that he found a snake when he was 8 and tried to get it to “bite him so he would die. But then he thought, ‘Who will take care of the goats?’ So that stopped him. Another time, he lay down so the goats would trample him, but they only lay down beside him.”

Mike’s childhood and Vietnam experience brought challenges early in the marriage. “He’d wake up terrorized and kicked me out of bed,” she said, but gradually Mike’s nightmares went away.

Jan says her family knows trouble. But she reads her Bible, prays and draws insight through her poetry. Jesus also came from humble and troubled beginnings, she noted, “so why not emulate him every chance we get?”