Life Unworthy of Life?
In an article written about rationing as it appears in the health care bills coming out of Congress, the views of one of President Obama’s top health advisors, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, are discussed relative to his beliefs regarding the rationing of health care, particularly to the elderly, the young and the disabled.
…medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from or becoming participating citizens...an obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”1
The following are three examples which from my viewpoint show how wrong Dr. Emanuel’s conclusions are. The value of a human life cannot be measured in days or years, nor can it be valued by state of health or by prognosis of treatment.
* * *
A well dressed, attractive woman sat in a doctor’s waiting room alternately clutching the handle of her walker and nervously opening and closing her leather handbag. Just once she turned and nervously smiled, but otherwise she looked sad and unsure of herself.
In the background the nurse telephoned a convalescent home to make sure that they were giving her her medication. At the same time the nurse asked how she would be able to get back to pick up her eyeglasses. Would someone be willing to do that, she asked. In the meantime the lady in the waiting room looked down and fidgeted as she heard her needs discussed within hearing distance of everyone else who was waiting.
I looked at her again as she spoke to the nurse. She made sense. She even looked relatively young. When she got up to walk, she used the walker. But she was steady and walked rapidly as she left the waiting room. “Why wasn’t she in her own home,” I wondered, or at least in the home of a relative or friend. Did she really need a convalescent home? Did she need such total care that other people needed to talk about her in front of her as if she were not even there?
I thought of my own mother at eighty, living in her house by herself, barely able to walk but thoroughly enjoying the dignity and independence of handling her own affairs. Her dogs, Cinder and Jackie, frolicked around the yard, and her roses bloomed as radiantly as ever. She loved to go out for dinner or to a store, but she always went back to her place, her home.
Then the accident occurred. But even with a broken hip and ankle she had a more clear memory than others who had been in the same car. And she still looked much younger than her age.
But now the statistics she hid so well in normal life were starkly apparent on a medical chart. She was old. She was eighty.
“Be sure to put her back in the rest home where she came from,” said a doctor we never met before, who looked older than my mother.
“She never has been in a convalescent home,” I replied.
“Well, anyone over eighty ought to be,” he said as he limped off down the hall.
Now, twenty years after what turned out to be a fatal car accident, my mind went back to an earlier time when as a student I had lived with a Chinese family. Birthdays in that family were always important and none of us were ever forgotten. But the memory that stands out most in my mind was the time when the oldest lady in the family turned sixty. According to Chinese custom at that time, age was revered and honored, and sixty was a milestone toward real respect. I still remember the beautiful pearl ring she received to commemorate the event.
In the western world we stigmatize age rather than commemorate it. We try to hide age with cosmetic surgery and excessive makeup. The old imitate the young, leaving the young with no one worth imitating. Then we wonder why teenage suicide increases along with an increased feeling of uselessness among those who are aging.
Biblical truth differs from all this, for in the Bible old age is given as an incentive for obedience, not as a curse. Furthermore, throughout the Bible age is revered. The biblical pattern is not to wish for death as soon as the first indication of aging is perceived, but rather to embrace age as a time of special mentoring of the young and as a period of unique intimacy with God. As such it is a period of respect.
The German philosopher Goethe has an often quoted saying which states that if we treat people as if they are already what they are capable of being, then we help them to become that. If we treat aging with respect, we help the aged to respect themselves and we insure that as we ourselves age we too will act in a way which will inspire respect.
Old age is not a time of throwaway years. In life there are no throwaway years. Old age is Ronald Reagan writing a letter which will forever inspire the world as he slipped into the shadow of Alzheimer’s. Old age is Mother Theresa ministering to the poor until God called her Home. Old age is sharing memories, listening to those who have no one to hear, imparting advice from the experience of years, forgiving because so much has been forgiven. Old age is a gift from God.
* * *
A man of eighty sat in my office telling me of his wife to whom he had been married some fifty years. She had developed Alzheimer’s and required total care, which this man was trying to give her at home. Taking care of her was not an easy task. She barely recognized him and was often difficult to handle. He was elderly, and the dark circles around his eyes and the drawn look on his face were evidence of the toll his task was taking on him. When I asked him why he didn’t put her in a convalescent home, a gentle look came over his face.
“Sometimes I don’t know why,” he started to explain, “but at night when she’s asleep lying in bed next to me, she’s herself again. I hold her, and look at her; and I have my wife again for just a little while.”
A short time later the woman died suddenly of a heart attack. But by the time she died, her husband had become gradually accustomed to doing without her. During that long transition between earth and Heaven, however, unknown to her until eternity, she had been a comfort to her grieving husband. She had helped him get used to her dying. When she was asleep she had reminded him of what used to be, and then she had gradually withdrawn from him during those difficult waking hours toward the end when she didn’t even recognize him. Even with the worst symptoms of her disease, her life had been meaningful.
* * *
He only lived for eighteen hours. The fight to save him was lost. A waste of technology, you could say. He was buried in an unmarked grave, a small brass disc with a number designates the location of his tiny remains. I never could find the exact spot, so instead of leaving flowers I brought something home: a small pine cone from a tree in the general location. I keep it on my computer desk to remind me of how precious eighteen hours can be.
He missed his first birthday. He never went to school or summer camp. He never slipped into the cool water of a lake on a hot summer afternoon. He never wrote a book or sang a song. But then, too, he never sat at his grandfather’s grave, or broke his arm in a fall from his bike, or watched his family split in two – or three or four.
Yet he lived, and still lives on. Part of that great crowd of Believers of Hebrews 12:1 who watch us from afar, he cheers us on like one member of a large crowd rooting for his team in the last inning. Joining with similar experience that group of the unborn who live in Heaven, perhaps he understands and supports and cheers us on with a slightly louder voice because he had those eighteen hours.
* * *
“You were there while I was being formed in utter seclusion! You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe...” – Psalm 139:15-16 (LB)
Footnotes
- From Hastings Center Report, Nov. – Dec. 1996, as reported by Betsy McCoughey, “Deadly Doctors,” The New York Post (July 24, 2009)