Today is a sandwich day. Not the eating kind, but existential kind. The kind where I experience the ways life is being cheapened not just in its beginnings, but also at its end. The kind where my prayer time outside an abortion facility is interrupted by a frantic call from my mom who is at the bedside of her brother who is dying of hospice.
I make a frantic call of my own, asking my co-leader to take over my role messaging vigil participants to fill up our calendar for a day or two so I can go to her. I suppose I should think of it as going for them. All of the six siblings and a couple of their spouses are crowded into the house. For most of them, hospice is a thing they accept or even embrace. In the sixty years or so that palliative care has been part of Western medicine, they've become slowly acclimated to the idea that someone will come along and declare that your life is over and pump you full of morphine until you die. It's easier that way. None of the awkward lingering that the elderly tend to when given such extreme measures as IV fluids. Without the large families of the past, it's almost impossible to imagine doing things any other way. Nursing homes or full time home care are insanely expensive and the two or three kids their generation had are ill equipped to pay those bills or do that work, even when almost everyone is holding down a full time job. This is the moment when the housewife suddenly becomes a precious resource with her flexible schedule and well-earned ease in dealing with other people's bodily fluids. Of the sixteen first cousins on that side, most of whom are married, I am one of only two who don't work in a paying job. The other is disabled. I will hug them and try to make sure they eat and drink and listen when needed, but I'm really there for my mom.
So I leave the sidewalk as soon as my replacement arrives and run home to throw dinner in the crock pot for my family. I grab an old Bible on my way out the door. On the sidewalk I read from a Bible app, but there I need something that can be passed around. Something that doesn't have to be re-charged. My uncle's family used to be members of our church. They believe in God. They're pretty sure they own a Bible. I have a whole collection, including ones left behind by several of my husband's grandparents and great aunts and uncles. I suspect that Great Aunt Marie, who I never met, won't mind if I leave her study Bible there for them.
We were very close to this uncle and his kids when I was growing up. My folks helped build this house. A million memories flood me every time I am here. Playing king of hill on the pile of construction sand and eating bologna and ketchup sandwiches when it was just a two-by-four skeleton. Making a fort out of an old log pile. Tromping through the woods. Telling dirty jokes in the tree house. My older and cooler cousin teaching me to slow dance on the driveway before my first junior high party. Panic attacks from the years before I started medication and any large crowd would put me into fight or flight mode. My uncle sure could draw a crowd back in the day. They had great parties here. Panic attacks create irrational fears. I still have to take a few calming breaths when I arrive to remind myself that I'm safe and that I drove myself and can leave at any time. But I can't. Because my uncle is dying and my mom needs someone to hear her when she says, "this is wrong." Someone to say, "I won't let them do this to you."
In survival training they say you can go three minutes without air, three days without water and three weeks without food. My uncle is on his third day without fluids. If you've ever had a really bad hangover, which is mostly dehydration, you have a pretty good idea of how he feels. Or how he would feel if he wasn't receiving a full dose of morphine every time he showed signs of regaining consciousness. If there is ever any doubt of whether I'd want to be artificially hydrated in my final days, let me be clear. I fully consent to IV fluids. I demand IV fluids. I've actually looked into what it would take to have the equipment on hand at home just in case. DO NOT LET ME DIE OF DEHYDRATION.
He may not die of dehydration. He's also laying flat on his back and they are suppressing his cough reflex with drugs. In between visits from the hospice nurse, who clears his airway, his oxygen levels slowly drop as his airway becomes more and more clogged. He may just choke to death on his own phlegm. Also low on my list of ways I want to go.
Everyone wants so badly to reduce his suffering. There was a time when I might have agreed that was a worthy goal. Nobody likes suffering. At almost fifty I know I am better for having suffered. None of the great epiphanies in my life came in the midst of ease. I have never grown closer to God in comfort. Character doesn't come from getting what you want. Of all the things I can't imagine my life without, none of them were without hardship and discomfort. To quote The Princess Bride, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
The worst part may be that my uncle didn't choose this. It was chosen for him. He wasn't actually dying in an imminent sense until hospice got involved. He had some dementia, was still physically weak from successful cancer treatment and was probably over-medicated. Then he had an injury that made him unable to care for himself. His wife and daughter who are also in poor health couldn't care for him, so when his hospital time was up the doctors asked if they wanted him sent to a nursing home they didn't feel they could afford or hospice. There are other options, but you have to demand them and fight for them and spend money out of your own pocket. Hospice is free and oh, so easy.
On the first few days, when they took away all his medications, he was mentally sharper than he'd been in months. Just a week ago we were watching the birds out the window and he laughed when I made a joke and growled when a squirrel managed to get on to the bird feeder. Today he lays there looking translucent and taking the raspy, rattling breaths of the dying. He hasn't been awake for days. He may never be again.
I want to be indignant and bully my way to bedside and demand that they do better. I want to write my congressman and my hospital and my church and demand the WE do better. I'll probably do the latter, but the former is a battle my mom already lost and starting it back up will only create a fight and not a solution. Still, I'm ashamed as I sit there in the awkward quiet as we try not to upset the man we're killing. Ashamed of myself and my family and my society. Ashamed of the cult of death that believes that the way to end suffering is to kill the suffering.
I love you, mom. I won't let them do this to you.
And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance.
Romans 5:3
The moon is still up as I don my old "Pray to End Abortion" sweatshirt and leave for the first day of the fall 2021 40 Days for Life campaign. My life is kind of in shambles right now. I feel like I'm already praying for life constantly with an uncle in hospice, one friend in Mayo waiting to find out if he has a treatable form of lymphoma or a variety that kills you quickly and another friend at the University Hospital where his toddler is struggling to survive to her third round of chemo. It's the last one, whether it works or not. My husband is spending his vacation trying to get his late father's neglected house in salable condition. I helped him load dozens of boxes and bags into a moving van yesterday and I ache everywhere. My step daughter is refusing to go to school. We've gone through every punishment we can think of - to no avail. My anti-depressant isn't working as well as the one I had to give up because of my auto immune condition. If you drop by my house, well, there appears to have been a struggle. The toilet is clean and there are dishes to eat off of and clothes to wear. Sorry about the dog hair. He's a German shedder. My phone fell off the charger last night and I only have 20% of my battery power.
But I'm headed out to Planned Parenthood at 7:00 in the morning on a Wednesday feeling horribly guilty that I can't quite get myself to the mental place I want to be in. "Fear not." It's all over the Bible. It's the message I try to convey to the women who I meet as a Sidewalk Advocate for Life. I have so many resources I can offer them in terms of physical and emotional support, but the one thing that I have to bring is hope. Hope that they are stronger than they feel. Hope that the people I represent really will make sure their needs are met. Hope that their baby will be worth all the challenges. Hope that I find really hard to feel on that sunrise drive.
Our rally was poorly attended. I know we were up against several other events, including The Church at Planned Parenthood, but the vigil calendar looks like a ghost town, with only three other hours filled that day besides mine. That's 8 more hours I have to find coverage for. I'm there for the first hour because I'm the leader. After volunteering for several years I agreed to take over last year when the old leader left the area to be near her grandchildren. Like me, she understood that leadership comes from getting your own hands dirty as often as not. The best way to get people to go where you send them is to invite them first to come to where you are.
Even with that calendar to fill, I spend the first half hour on my knees. This the one part I don't struggle with. Well, my knees don't love it, but I have no trouble finding things to say to God in the cool quiet of the morning. The Lord's prayer centers me. Then I pray for the clients who walk through those doors of death, the staff, their vendors, the community, the nation and the church. I pray to fight back the lie that women can't have meaningful, valuable lives unless they chase sex rather than love; that the natural rhythms and power of the female body are bad; that any other work is more important than bringing up the next generation. I pray that God will drive out the worship of self from all hearts, especially mine.
I'd love to say my work here is selfless, but that would be a lie. I'm here because too many people I love were in the cross-hairs of the abortion industry before they were born - the children of parents who were young or poor or in a bad relationship or not really in a relationship at all; people who had some prenatal diagnosis that may or may not have significantly affected their life. Some of them survived actual abortion appointments, though most of them don't know that detail. How could you ever tell your child you seriously considered snuffing out their life before they took their first breath? Too many women - and men - I know have been damaged by the abortion of their own child. Too many grandparents have had to beg for the lives of their grandchildren only to be ignored and left to grieve both the life of their descendant and a their damaged relationship with their child. The scars of abortion and its victims are real. I know people are sinful and we'll never really wipe out all abortions. I also know how much we all suffer from living in a community and a country where you can kill your son or daughter in a strip mall in broad daylight on a Tuesday afternoon.
So I pray until my knees are numb and the hope comes. The power of the Holy Spirit doesn't magically fill the calendar, but twenty or so text messages goes a long way toward that. As I read from the book of Psalms I'm reminded of contacts I haven't reached out to yet. I recall a stack of contact cards and the name of the elder I met from a large church I haven't managed to connect with. Our campaign will get through the day. God will make it possible.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them.
Psalms 34:19
