"The One Slide" - Engage with Grace
A friend once described to me what happened when their dog was hit by a car. She took him to the vet and said, “Do whatever it takes; I don’t want to lose him.” Thousands of dollars later, she regretted it. They’d put the dog through a lot of pain, spent a lot of money that was needed elsewhere, and as she put it, “It’s just a dog. Yes, we love him, but he’s not a person, and he’s going to die, just like all pets do – sooner than we want.” While the equation for people is obviously not so simple, our failure to address the simple, inevitable reality that we WILL die is also painful and expensive.
Bill Clinton said, regarding Terri Schiavo and the benefits of having a living will, “It’s interesting to me that we always proclaim – especially certain numbers of us – that we’re the most religious big country in the world,” said Clinton. “It may be true, but we also seem to be the most reluctant to get to heaven.” He’s got a point. He doesn’t come right out and espouse euthanasia, but does say that if more of us had living wills, it would help solve the health care crisis. Interestingly, most people believe in heaven, and most people think they’re going to go there, although they can’t support that belief with biblical reasons why. And few have a biblical concept of what heaven will be like. So we fear pain, of course, but we probably fear death and the unknown even more. And we don’t discuss it, hoping this reality will go away.
My husband (a cancer survivor) and I (a widow when I married him) have discussed end-of-life care many times. I tell him, “I get to die first!” as if you can call shotgun on that. And if I do, my problem is solved. But since we don’t know what will happen in life – and because we’ve observed what we don’t want to happen with close family members when other people had the right to make the decisions – we’ve discussed it in detail. It’s not enough to simply say, “Don’t put me on life support.” You have to define life support. Is a feeding tube life support to you? What happens to the body when food and water are withdrawn? Is it a painless, peaceful, easy way to die as Michael Schiavo claimed, or is it what Kate Adamson described?
The agony of going without food was a constant pain that lasted not several hours like my operation did, but several days. You have to endure the physical pain and on top of that you have to endure the emotional pain. Your whole body cries out, “Feed me. I am alive and a person, don’t let me die, for God’s Sake! Somebody feed me.”… I craved anything to drink. Anything. I obsessively visualized drinking from a huge bottle of orange Gatorade. And I hate orange Gatorade. I did receive lemon flavored mouth swabs to alleviate dryness but they did nothing to slack my desperate thirst.
I imagine it varies by person and condition; some people are surely more aware than others. What are you willing to risk having to endure when you can’t speak for yourself anymore?
Our worst-case scenario – if I get hit by a bus (our favorite all-purpose unexpected, life-threatening event) and doctors tell my husband I’m in a persistent vegetative state, then what? It’s common these days to withhold food and water so the person “dies naturally.” But… in one study, 43% of patients diagnosed with PVS were misdiagnosed. Another 25% came out of it. We’re content to be taken off of respirators and other medical equipment, and if we die without them, so be it. We also both agree that we do not, under any circumstances, want to be starved or dehydrated. Although we’re not Catholic, we wholeheartedly agree with the Catholic church that the “administration of food and water (whether by natural or artificial means) to a patient in a “vegetative state” [is] morally obligatory.”
So now I’m in a vegetative state, racking up hospital bills that will burden my family for years, receiving palliative care including food and water, if necessary through a feeding tube. Sure, he could bring me home, but he can’t quit his job to stay home and care for me. Can we afford for him to pay for a sitter and/or home nursing care? Will family and friends take shifts? What if I don’t die for months? Years? We believe in and trust a sovereign God, but we also believe He expects us to plan ahead. We don’t expect the harvest to end up in the barn of its own accord; we sow the seeds, cultivate the fields, and pick the crop, right? If we don’t intend to be starved/dehydrated in our helpless condition, we need to have a plan for that. So we’re making one, now, while we are able.
Part of our considerations are that along with the burden of being the surviving partner, there are unique benefits. As The Anchoress put it,
“my wishes are changed, and that is due to both Terri and my brother, S. Before S, I would have said, “just let me go – no life support of any kind – ” Now, I am not so certain. Now, I think…why deprive my family of the opportunity to love? Why deprive myself of the chance to be loved and to love them back? I am too grateful for those extra weeks with S, that no one, not the doctors, not the nurses, not the chaplains believed we would have. Those weeks were so precious, and I learned so much – so very much – about love, and about how as long as love exists, as long as someone is being loved and trying to love back, no matter how feebly…you are in the midst of a Holy Mystery.
If God is love, and that love is alive – in life, no matter how compromised…then it seems to reason that if life is destroyed, or ended too soon, then it is a kind of eclipse of love, an eclipse of God. I look at Terri Schiavo and I see S. I see Christ. I see the brain-injured people I used to work with, and I see Christ. I see something “there.” If I am wrong, I am wrong. But I might be right.”
It is a tenet of our faith that we are not put on earth to achieve our own goals, but to glorify God – and that our joy is found in doing so. Pope Benedict suggests that the sick pray for the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God. It’s not just to glorify God or for our own benefit – it’s for the benefit of others as well. Certainly loving and caring for someone in this capacity glorifies God. And it is a special kind of grace of which we would deprive ourselves in our desire not to be burdened. Some burdens are worth carrying. Carrying burdens can tire us out, but it also builds our strength.
This is “The One Slide” from Engage with Grace:
It’s intended to get the conversation going. It is not a Christian or even a religious project. When they use the term grace, I believe they mean to include these definitions -
- elegance and beauty of movement or expression;
- seemliness: a sense of propriety and consideration for others;
- a disposition to kindness and compassion;
and not this one: “the free and unmerited favor or beneficence of God.” But for Christians, “end of life” conversations should certainly acknowledge and plan for God’s continued grace to us from birth until death. Planning for death doesn’t show a lack of faith in God’s sovereignty any more than buying life insurance does. Christians, who believe that our eternal life is assured, ought to be meeting death with grace in both the worldly and theological meanings of the word. It glorifies God and provides a testimony to people who don’t know Him.
It’s not too soon to talk about it. My husband was 26 when he was diagnosed with cancer, and apart from experimental treatment at MD Anderson in Houston, he would have died. I was 21 when I was widowed. Now I’m 40 and he’s 46, and we’ve had a variety of illnesses and life-threatening accidents in the last two decades; we’ll surely have more in the future. The bottom line is that nobody gets out of here alive. It’s time to talk about it.
h/t Kevin MD
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