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‘You Pull. I’ll Push.’
BY Tom Hoopes
January 4-10, 2009 Issue |
Posted 12/19/08 at 12:36 PM
"You pull. I'll push."
That was all he could manage in the
circumstances, perhaps, but even in those few words, you can see a way of life.
It was, in my opinion, the most
inspiring story the Register published in 2008. Thomas Vander Woude, 66, said
those words on his Virginia farm from deep inside a septic tank where his son
had fallen. He was calling to a neighbor who was helping heave his son, Joseph
Vander Woude, an 18-year-old with Down syndrome, to safety, out in the fresh
air, saving his life.
He said those four words and
couldn’t say anything else. He passed out and then drowned.
“You pull. I’ll push.” I’ll do this
hard thing, this sacrificial thing, and you help me, and then we both will have
done it. That was how Vander Woude lived his life.
For 10 years, he coached his sons in
basketball at Seton School in Manassas, Va.
He didn’t just coach for the love of
sports, either. His son Dan told the Register, “He didn’t know soccer, but
there was a need, so he went to coaching clinics to learn that.”
“He never took a cent for it,” said
the school’s director, Anne Carroll. Vander Woude was a successful coach who
won games. But more than that, “He was a mentor,” she said. “He wanted them to
be good young men, not just good players.”
He challenged the kids; they
responded with enthusiasm.
One dad wrote online: “He coached my
youngest son in JV basketball at Seton last year. He was a great coach. In
every game he could, he would put my son in during the last minute of the game so
he could know the joy of playing on a team and being cheered by the crowd.”
He pushed. They pulled.
His friends saw the same thing in
him. “He’s the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back,” his
neighbor Lee DeBrish told The Washington
Post. “And if he didn’t have one, he’d buy one for you.”
“When my wife and I got married, we
were trying to buy a townhouse,” Peter Scheetz told the
Post. “We didn’t have any credit. … Tom Vander Woude ended up
cosigning our loan for our first house.”
When people needed a boost, he gave
it to them. Then they could take the next step.
“When others asked about the secrets
of success for raising Catholic families, he was always quick to point to the
family Rosary,” said Dan. “He was definitely devoted to Our Lady.”
But not just that.
“He also did a Holy Hour between two
and three in the morning and was a daily communicant. With the Rosary, he used
to say a prayer to St. Joseph,” said Dan. “Those were the things in front of us
that we saw of our father. In this culture, which is selling a lot of stuff, I
had a father on his knees who was showing me how to be a man of God.”
In other words, every day, Tom
Vander Woude asked Mary to be with his family, “now, and at the hour of our
death.” And every day, he went where she sent him — to her Son, in the
Eucharist.
The hour of his death came,
appropriately enough, on Sept. 8, Mary’s birthday. He was buried seven days
later on Sept. 15, the feast of the Mother of Sorrows.
He pushed. She pulled.
His dying act was “truly saintly,”
Bishop Paul Loverde said at his funeral, “the crown of a whole life of
self-giving. May we find in his life inspiration and strength.”
I have. Hardly a day has gone by since
September when his example hasn’t been on my mind — or when I haven’t been
presented an opportunity to follow it.
When
I’m tempted to cut corners with my own seven children or my own spiritual life,
I actually find myself thinking, “That won’t make me more like Tom Vander
Woude.” Then I do the harder thing.
Mr. Vander Woude, thanks for the push.
Tom Hoopes is the Register’s executive editor.
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