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Until We Are Parted by Death
At National Review Online, Wesley J. Smith has written an essay about the increase in “couples euthanasia” in European countries that have adopted an affirmative right to end your own life. In a story guaranteed to evoke “ahhhs” from sentimental leftists and perhaps a recognizant twinge from anyone who is in love with his or her spouse, he describes an elderly couple who died “holding hands, surrounded by loved ones.”
They were both 91, seriously old even by 21st century standards.
The couple’s daughter told The Gelderlander [translated]. “The geriatrician determined that our mother was still mentally competent. However, if our father were to die, she could become completely disoriented, ending up in a nursing home. “Something which she desperately did not want. Dying together was their deepest wish.
When my first husband died, I had our four young children to think of, so the thought of joining Drew in death could not be entertained for long… but it definitely did occur. So I get the “deepest wish” thing, truly.
Once upon a time, I was a parish minister and one of my elderly (90-ish) parishioners, “Sally,” was dying. I went to visit her in the hospital, finding her semi-comatose in her bed, surrounded by an encampment of family members and with her not-dying but very old and dignified husband beside her.
The husband–I’ll call him Fred– had not left his wife’s side for two days, sitting upright in a chair, holding her hand and refusing all invitations and entreaties to go home to bed, if not for the night then at least for a nap. I suggested that if Fred wouldn’t go to bed, maybe the bed could come to him? The nurse agreed. We found a cot and wedged it in between the wall and Sally’s bed. Upon discovering that the cot wasn’t high enough to allow Fred to be able to comfortably maintain his grip on Sally’s hand, we stacked another mattress on top. Fred clambered aboard this slightly precarious perch, lay down, took hold of Sally’s hand and grinned blissfully.
I was standing at the foot of what was now–sort of–a double bed. I was dressed in clerical garb. Fred was still wearing his customary jacket and tie. Sally looked lovely in a white hospital gown draped in a white blanket. There were bouquets in the vicinity. “Yeesh, this looks like a wedding!” said one of the grandchildren.
Fred and Sally’s daughter’s eyes at once lit up. “That’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to have a wedding!” She ran out into the hall to collect stray grandchildren who had wandered away during the cot-moving exercise, roped in a few nurses’ aids and a doctor or two. One of the grandchildren strummed a guitar.
“In the presence of God and of this beloved congregation,” I performed a renewal of vows and, “by the power vested in me by the State of Maine,” pronounced that Sally and Fred were still married. Fred kissed the bride, who smiled.
Sally died the next morning.
Fred had loved, honored, and been faithful to Sally for sixty years, but they were parted by death.
The sweet old Dutch couple in the story have been parted by death, too. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiographical A Grief Observed: “Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats.”
The notion that we can (let alone should) die together with our loved ones and then spend eternity in a celestial version of earthly reality is as absurd and, in its way, as selfish as the idea that we can take our money with us when we go. That the Dutch wife might become completely disoriented or might end up in a nursing home was not reason for her to die in some sort of refined pharmaceutical suttee. For all her children’s sentimentalizing self-exculpation, the fact remains that a double-euthanasia has freed them from the duty (and, if only they could see it this way, the privilege) of comforting their mother through the grief that is the privilege of love.
“Et voila,” Smith writes. “…Before you know it, the children of elderly parents attend and celebrate their joint euthanasia killings–instead of urging them to remain alive and assuring them that they will be loved and cared for, come what may. Euthanasia corrupts everything it touches, including the perceptions of children’s obligations to aging parents and society’s duties toward their elderly members.” It also extends an already-endemic and self-indulgent DiCaprio/Winslet identification of eros rather than agape with the highest, best manifestation of love.
A good friend and fine warden, Michael, demonstrated true love when his wife died. He was devastated. And yet, within minutes of her death, when a kind nurse at the hospital tried to tell him “she’ll always be with you,” Michael gently corrected her. “She is with God.”
For all my anguished yearning to somehow be with Drew after he died, he was with God. It was a privilege to grieve for him and to carry his memory into the life he did not get to live with me. I I frequently assure my present husband that he is obliged to outlive me, but if he instead predeceases me, then as his (hopefully aged) wife I will yield him into God’s embrace and mourn him fiercely, for whatever time is given me to live. It is living on and loving more, not dying-too that honors love.
Fred, by the way, grieved strongly for his Sally. It hurt to lose her; was–as C.S. Lewis would say–a kind of amputation. And yet, he lived on. Sure, he needed more help as he got even older. He moved in with his daughter and son-in-law… and then he started dating again.
Published in Marriage
I hope so, too.
It’s really hard to see someone suffer pain. I have to remind people (and myself) that grief is love. Indeed, it is intense, excruciating love. How lucky your grandparents were, to love and be loved so passionately. You can tell by their photograph that they made good use of life, all the way to the end. Beautiful people!
“Our loves are not given, but only lent
At compound interest of cent per cent.”
Rudyard Kipling
Off topic, but Jesus told the Sadducees “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.” (Matthew 22:30)
Not off topic at all! Thank you!
We have to keep fighting against the increasing loss of the value of a human life. This essay does that.
Thank you for this, Kate.
Kate, what about Jesus’ comparisons of heaven to a wedding feast: the casting out of the guest not properly festally dressed, etc. I love Jack Lewis as much as anyone, but I’m not sure a grieving widower, who didn’t intend to publish these thoughts, or at least not under his own name, should be the go-to on this one…
I am trying to wrap my head around this. I kind of do believe in family reunions on the further shore. Who are we without the people we love? None of that justifies suicide.
This thread was hard for me. My father died last year at age 94. My mother is 94 now. Her memory is mostly gone. She still knows who I am but is confused about a lot. When she was in her 80s she told me she would never want to go on living if she could no longer bathe herself. We are well past that point.
She seems happy most of the time and doesn’t ask for my father anymore. Some nights I lie awake trying to understand what her life is like, wondering how to do the right thing for her. My wife has been a great comfort in this.
I kinda wish Kate had officiated at our wedding. Maybe if we renew our vows someday, eh?
The end of life sucks.
None of this should be easy for anyone. Like Peter Singer, who changed his mind about bumping off the addled old when it was his own mom, personal experience sometimes clarifies but more often muddles. “Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”
C.S. Lewis says pretty much the same thing— it was different when it was his own deceased loved one.
One of the great obstacles to human advancement is that our ability to learn from vicarious experience is not unlimited.
Exactly! Who are we without the people we love?
This is the conundrum the bereaved (including C.S. Lewis) faced. I did, too. If Drew and I had died at exactly the same moment, or even within a few months of one another, we would remain who we were. But I am not who I was. I’ve had a whole lot of experiences he didn’t share and—presumably—so has he.
To imagine him hovering in limbo, waiting for his flesh-of-my-flesh and bone-of-my-bone (fleshlessly, bonelessly, erghhh….) to arrive —wrinkled, arthritic, trailing memories of grandchildren numerous as stars*— is to deny him the fullness of his own soul. It makes him an accessory to me, the purse that completes the Kate Suit.
My faith is not that Drew and I will meet and complete one another. My faith is that, whatever it is, it will be fine. The afterlife is not my problem. My problem is how to live both with others and then without them…
*a girl can dream.
Beautifully put, Kate!
Oh, it’s possible —indeed, rather likely—that God has arranged everything such that, whatever is on the far shore, it will be glorious beyond our wildest imaginings…but that’s sort of the point. Our wildest imaginings are inadequate. Hence the metaphors: heaven is a grand celebration. Bring your dancing shoes.
But if Drew is in heaven wildly celebrating now…he isn’t Drew. Drew was a complicated, moody, handsome, deeply moral, honorable, hilarious, courageous guy. What need have we of courage in heaven? Or morality, when all our choices will be good ones? What will we laugh at when there is nothing to fear? Who am I without my friends and relatives is the ultimate existential question, isn’t it? If I was the last person on earth, would I still be me? Would the great commandment still apply when there were no neighbors around in need of my love? Etc. etc.
This is where I ended up, after Drew died: He’s fine. Whatever it is, he is okay. Death is just death. It happens. I’ll get there myself, and the fact that Drew (and my father, and my grandson, and various other people I couldn’t be me without) went first makes whatever it is a whole lot less frightening.
I hope there’s a sofa. And beer.
Anyway, what I wanted to add was that this is yet another example of an irreconcilable paradox human beings insist on trying to reconcile: life is sacred. And: life can be so pointless and painful that death seems (and may even be, quite rationally) preferable.
I am constantly informing my beleaguered husband of all the situations I don’t want to be alive in. I don’t want to be sitting around in a nursing home, unable to remember who my children are. (“Who are we, without the people we love?” indeed!) I don’t want to waste my own and my family’s time and treasure being subjected to one Hail-Mary chemo course after another on the outside chance that I might get to live a little longer. I don’t want to lie in a persistent vegetative state, or anything approximating such.
My brother, meanwhile, says that if he has to have help using the bathroom for more than one day, he wants to die.
But then my beleaguered husband reminds me that it’s not just about me. (Who are we…etc.) “What if living six more months meant seeing your great-grandchild’s face before you die? What if it’s important to me that I take good care of you when you have Alzheimer’s, even if you don’t know who I am?” he asks.
“Promise to keep my chin-hairs plucked?” I ask him.
Here’s the best advice of a disaster-based minister: once you accept that it’s going to be excruciating, humiliating and horrible, it (whatever “it” is) is a little easier to deal with. Plan for the worst and then you can be pleasantly surprised by anything short of hellishness. “At least I didn’t get suckered into hoping for the best,” you can tell yourself, with grim satisfaction.
A powerful observation. Thank you for a beautiful post, Kate.
Kate,
On another post, I said that we weren’t going down a slippery moral slope but were more like falling down an amoral rabbit hole. This is just one more dangerous erosion of the moral fiber of Western Civilization. As is the custom recently it is couched in feel good gibberish.
I am glad that you and every other serious religious representative are out there. You are the cops on this beat. Feel free anytime to shout loud and long when you see this kind of nonsense trying to sneak in and pose as respectable.
Regards,
Jim
It’s been said elsewhere and better, but how long will it be before we start seeing increasing pressure on the elderly to stop being a burden on the healthcare system, on their loved ones, etc.? How fast will that subtle pressure on the small of the back increase to the point where it’s compulsion? Having just gone through this phase with my parents, I can tell you that Medicare paperwork can be a great advertisement for Despair. I’d hate to be in a position where my folks might turn around and decide to “save everyone the trouble.” How voluntary are these suicides going to be in the future?
Isn’t that what Obamacare is all about? I know the popular image is that Republicans oppose Obamacare because they want old people to die, but that’s a neat Orwellian reversal that the Democrats pulled.
But Obama signaled as much when he suggested that maybe we don’t give elderly people needed surgery. Maybe we just give them pain pills instead. (Am I suggesting that the government might be playing a role in the increase in opioid addiction? Why yes, I am.)
Beautifully put. I was going to say that death takes care of itself, and we need to worry about how we’re living. But you put the same thought far more gracefully.
The right to die will become the duty to die.
This piece reminded me of a poem I had sent to my aunt when my uncle died. I can’t find the author:
One or the other must leave,
One or the other must stay.
One or the other must grieve,
That is forever the way.
That is the vow that was sworn,
Faithful ’til death do us part.
Braving what had to be borne,
Hiding the ache in the heart.
One, howsoever adored,
First must be summoned away.
That is the will of the Lord
One or the other must stay. ~Anonymous
You bet! A young (32-year-old) man living with HIV, whom I’d met serendipitously, was tucked away in an isolation room in the hospital where I was on a training placement. He told me he’d start working on my Queen-Anne-style Victorian mansion; from widow’s-walk to basement immediately upon his dying. I would not be called Home until it’s complete, he assured me. My friend and mentor died in 1991.
I’m still here, but yesterday morning, at Mass for the Assumption of Our Lady, I heard my dear late Mom P. singing along to her favorite Marian hymn with us. Life is changed, not ended…
(Some in the disability-as-identity camp insist that disability persists in heaven, because of its role in forming personhood, btw…NOT THIS PANDA.)
If Drew is in heaven, he is perfected Drew. Courage and morality will be transformed into the attributes appropriate for the tasks that await him. Yes, there is work to be done; our lives here prepare us for the tasks in heaven. We are not told about those tasks, only that we live here in preparation to undertake those tasks. Just as Lazarus and Abraham recognize each other in the parable, Kate and Drew will recognize and enjoy each other. Though they will not be married, they will be in communion, both with each other and with other loved ones, and, most importantly, with the LORD.
Crown Him the Lord of love,
Behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above,
In beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky
Can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye
At mysteries so bright.
Maybe there will be need of courage, and maybe something to fear – with that wildly thrilling fear like falling crazy in love. Something so holy the angels cannot bear to look on it would take courage to see face-to-face, I’d think.
As for moody, I won’t speculate as to which composers make it to heaven, but no one’s ever pictured heaven as the place of no music, and why exclude the ravishingly beautiful “moody” music? Did Gesualdo make it to heaven? Shrug. But how could his music not have?
Nope. You’re going to be dancing—-and I hope I get to dance with you!
Works for me, MJB!
We get glimpses of it—whatever it is— in life. I am satisfied with my glimpses. Indeed, I’m wildly grateful for them, for it makes it easier to trust that whatever comes next, it is safe and fine. Drew is safe and fine. My Dad is safe and fine. My grandson is safe and fine. I shall be safe and fine. Even “safe” and “fine” aren’t adequate words, let alone “it’ll be okay,” or “it is what it is.” But… it will and it is.