When My Grandma Died

My Grandma was 82 when she died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. After her initial regimen of chemo failed to put the cancer in remission, the doctors all but refused to further her treatment. There was little point in doing anything more agressive to stop the cancer. The type of chemo she received was considered cutting edge medicine but it failed to work for her. My granmother understood that this was a bad kind of cancer to get and that her old body wasn't in much of a position to fight with anything experimental. The reasoning was that it would have only marred her final days. One has to ask, What is preferrable, dying from the disease or its treatment, which may not work very well anyway?

The logic of those who claim that life begins at conception are missing the fact that, were this true, my grandmother's death would have been a suicide. Her doctors would have been guilty of malpractice, or worse -- murder perhaps. What language is out of bounds in this war of words? My grandma didn't die of cancer. She didn't die of the treatment. She starved to death, wasted away. This is a much better way to go than one could imagine. It turns out that we waste away pretty quietly. It takes weeks. And she didn't refuse to eat. She just couldn't eat enough to keep her strength up. After a while she couldn't eat at all. The only thing going in was water and morphine. For her this was as close as she could get to mercy. Cancer is a pretty merciless thing. Clearly though, we could imagine technology intervening in circumstances like what my grandma faced as she lay dying. We can imagine hooking people up to all sorts of machines that keep life in some sort of technical sense present in the body. But who would that serve.

To the way we normally think about what life is and what dignity is, talk about a few brainwaves and a microscopic cluster of cells -- this is not talk that makes a lot of sense. Why are we under so many obligations to embryos that we are apparently not to convicted felons? Why is war not problematic but an early abortion such a great evil?

I think the real problem for the religious right is that they can't live without knowing there is a soul. When does the soul get hooked up with the body? Well, it must happen at conception. The soul has to start with an event. They have no imagination for a soul that is an effect of the brain. This is so troubling to them that they have to insist everyone agree that conception is the divine moment when God fuses flesh and spirit.

If the abortion battle was not really about this great fear, this great imaginative crisis that the far right refuse to acknowledge, then it makes little sense why they insist on a law. Why not simply protest the action? Why not satisfy themselves with reducing the number of abortions? Why not compromise and start out demanding an end to the late-term abortions only? There is no room for compromise becuase compromise does not defend their dogma. The dogma that life begins at conception protects them from the fear that there may be no soul. Maybe all we are is a mass of cells. This is an idea they can't live with. It is so horrifying that many are willing to kill those that suggest it.

This is so far from the essence of Christianity exemplified in the life of Jesus as to be not only unrecognizable but a deep insult to anyone who takes Jesus seriously. Jesus pretty clearly distanced himself from all violence and certainly all retaliation. So why the hate-speech if it isn't out of fear that they and their savior are wrong and after death is an abyss of nothing?

This is pretty heady anthropological stuff, but this is the current American moment. We live with a group of religious people who live without faith. The insist on religious facts. If you deny these "facts" they are ready to curse you. And maybe ready to kill you.

I can't help how at odds the spirit of the times is with the quiet death of my peaceful Christian grandmother.

twL