I want to Get to Know You
By David Woodbury
As I am getting my son ready for bed each night I like to put some gentle music on in his room. Sam loves melodic tunes, familiar voices, songs that soothe.
For those who don’t know him: Sam is 35, non-verbal, exclusively tube-fed since he was a baby, severely limited from birth both physically and mentally. He learned to walk with a walker by about age 5, but by 15 he had fallen too many times and was afraid to stand up unless supported by someone. He communicates some needs and preferences with gestures and vocal utterances, and he also effectively expresses enthusiasm and protest. He confers winsome smiles and initiates hugs when he feels like it. If something is interesting he moves his wheelchair toward it. If it’s not interesting he propels himself away. I think he understands that he is dependent. He trusts us, his parents, and trusts those others who regularly occupy his time, whether as caregivers, close relatives, or friends. He clearly understands love. He clearly fears certain potential risks and is especially fearful of falling when he is briefly on his feet to transfer from one situation to another — wheelchair to car, for instance. These limitations are the reason Beth and I are the ones who prepares his bedtime medicines, get him into his nightwear, and tuck him in as his favorite gentle music plays quietly in the background.
It’s late September, 2025. Last night we were listening to Anne Murray as I was getting him ready for bed. And the song we were hearing as I pulled the covers over him before turning off the light, was “A Love Song.”
For those acquainted with Anne Murray, it’s the song that begins:
There’s a wren in a willow wood
Flies so high and sings so good
And he brings to you
What he sings to you
Like my brother, the wren and I
Well, he told me, if I try
I could fly for you
And I want to try for you, ’cause
I want to sing you a love song
I want to rock you in my arms all night long
I want to get to know you
I want to show you the peaceful feeling of my home…
For those not acquainted with Anne Murray, well, this is the sort of stuff she sings.
As I was reaching to pat his head before turning off the music, I heard myself quietly singing along with the refrain, and one line stopped me short: “I want to get to know you” echoed across the canyons of my consciousness. I let the song play out. Then I stopped the music and said, as I always do: “Good night, Sam. We love you.”
I have seldom, even in Sam’s lifetime, been moved to tears. But, for me anyway, there was a message from God last night in those seven words, “I want to get to know you.” For, even though he’s been in the core of my own life since the day he was born, and even though I’ve often wondered what he’s seeing — (he has “cortical visual impairment”), what he’s thinking, whether he hurts somewhere or is thirsty or hungry or lonely, I hadn’t, until last night, considered that it would ultimately be granted to me, by the grace of God, to fully get to know him. For — once we have both left this physical world, I, in the fullness of my time and he, in his — he will surely be able to tell me what it was like to be Sam.
It came over me that those who doubt the existence of God have no explanation for the roots of love. Error-prone as I am, how can I treat Sam with such tenderness and such longing to get to know him if there is no God, no divine origin of love? It would be a cruel creator who would let us yearn so much and not offer fulfillment. The words of Jesus in Luke 11:11-13 came to mind as I stood in the darkened house, outside his bedroom door, wiping my cheeks: “And what father is there among you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an egg, he will give him a scorpion? If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more certainly will your
Rarely has Sam spoken in my nighttime dreams, and when he has, it has been only a word or two. On the night of December 26, 2021, though, he spoke much more, and it tore my heart out. In a dream that night, Beth and I were supporting Sam as he slowly and awkwardly walked between us. We began climbing the five front steps to the little house we owned before Sam was born. We had barely started upward when we realized there was a large, noisy, demanding crowd on the small front porch, their attention turned toward something inside.
There was no explanation in the dream for the presence of such a group, and whatever they sought, it was suddenly no longer inside the modest little home. They all stampeded down the stairs in pursuit of the attraction they sought, and they ran us over. The abrupt rush quickly passed, but the three of us, Beth, Sam, and I, were trampled.
In the aftermath Beth and I picked ourselves up and brought Sam to his feet. Gushing tears from the pained face of one who knows too well how it feels to be pushed aside, ignored, and left behind, Sam cried out: “I try so hard, to understand, to keep up, to do what everyone wants me to…” — and that’s where that mercifully brief nightmare woke me up.
I have seldom taken the trouble to put a dream into writing, but I quickly did so with this one and I still have that note. For, that day back in 2021, I understood that I’d had a glimpse into Sam’s humble, quiet spirit.
Last night, though, after hearing the lyrics, “I want to get to know you,” I had what I felt was a promise. Not in this lifetime, but in that realm that some call the afterlife — in Paradise, in the our spiritual presence before God, I will get to know Sam. Perhaps I’ll get to know him as if I had lived inside his struggling, tortured body, as if I had felt the hope in his wishing heart, and as he has seen me, his father, through his flawed vision.
Sam, to you I say: In this life I can only imagine what it’s like to be you. In the next, I trust I will truly get to know you. It’s not what I want, though, that matters. I believe that you will get to know what it might have been like if you could have lived in this world free of the bonds of KAT6A syndrome. You deserve that much from the God who created love.