Clinging to Life

 

My sister’s mother-in-law is dying.  M. has leukemia, is diabetic and also has a flesh-eating infection that is destroying her legs.  On Saturday, my sister, brother-in-law and their two kids drove to eastern Iowa to the hospital where M. is.  

Apparently, my brother-in-law’s father had not been reporting the situation accurately to convey how serious it is.  Fortunately, my b-in-law’s brother called to tell them how bad it is.  

They cannot amputate her legs.  She’s in terrible pain and on a lot of drugs to help alleviate that.  She was alert enough to talk with my niece and nephew on Saturday, but the doctors didn’t expect her to live through the night.

I meditated on Saturday evening and devoted it to loving-kindness for M. and for her family who is there with her.  It was what I could do.  She lived through the night.  I have not heard further news. 

At what point do we decide to withhold important information from our children because we don’t want to worry them and don’t want to burden them.  Where do you draw the line?  Why do we draw a line?  I will likely grow old.  I’ll probably have health issues of some kind or other.  I certainly will die at some point.  It remains to be seen how much my child will be involved in my life then.

I hope to have a grandchild someday.  I’d like to see my daughter age and have a life of her own.  I want to grow old with my husband and enjoy our life together.  Clinging, grasping, plotting, controlling, avoiding, fearing . . . Nothing guarantees that what I hope for and what I want will actually happen.

  

What's Worse Than Death?

 ...gracious and eternal death who permits departure...

The book/discussion group I’m in is currently reading zombie fiction and a collection of philosophical essays.  In our first meeting we talked about and defined some terms and ideas.  What is a zombie?  Are zombies human?  Are zombies evil?

We’re a mixed group, some with little to no pop culture knowledge of zombies and vampires.  Others have quite of lot of TV, movies and literature under our belts.  The driving question is why are we so fascinated with the undead? What does it say about our beliefs and spirituality in this modern world?  We’re focusing on zombies at the moment but plan to discuss vampires later as their own group.

A friend at work simplified it in one fell-swoop.  “It’s because cannibalism is the ultimate taboo.”  I think that is true to a certain extent, but it doesn’t explain all of it.    

Last week, we started our discussion by working on a definition of spirituality, what does it mean to be spiritual?  We also talked about soul and afterlife.  This matters because the philosophical essay we'd just read was about the "Badness of Undeath."  Meaning, why is being dead better than being undead.  Obviously, if you believe in heaven, you want to be there, enjoying your death in a new pleasant form of existence.  Being undead means that you are just back here again as this unthinking, falling apart, rotting body that shambles around trying to eat people.   

There are a lot of theological problems associated with becoming undead.  

We also explored the idea that zombies function in two ways: as metaphor and as plot device to advance a message.  Metaphor = science gone wrong.  Plot device for we can’t trust the government not to kill or damage us with their chemicals, vaccines etc. therefore government = bad.

I think our fascination points to things even bigger.  Fear of death, uncertainty of afterlife, ambiguous messages about soul, refusal to think for ourselves about these things, the idea that it doesn't matter what I've done or been in this life I might still be a brain-eating zombie.  I don’t know for sure, but I know that it leads to me to think about things worse than death, and the poem by Sharon Olds  Things That Are Worse Than Death

If you can't think of anything, ask the next zombie or vampire you meet.

Blind Faith Scares Me

Isn’t it about time that we review and reconsider the Bible’s translations and language.  What we know now definitely suggests that many words and phrases have not been accurately translated from the original Greek.  Take a word like messiah, which is the transliteration of a Hebrew term, Mashiach. The New Testament (Greek) equivalent to the word messiah is christos, and both terms mean "the anointed one."   It also has hints of chosen, promised.  After Jesus’ death, the early Christian movement took the word christos and made it Christ to refer to Jesus.

In that vein, I pass this along.  It is yet another compelling reason for why we MUST be able to think critically about the sources of our beliefs.   Blind adherence to anything is ignorant and offensive.  It does not serve God, and it does not advance the truest messages of religious beliefs.

Is Evangelical Christianity Having a Great Gay Awakening?  by Cathleen Falsani

“In his new book Fall to Grace: A Revolution of God, Self and Society, Jay Bakker, the son of Jim Bakker and the late Tammy Faye Messner, gives clear and compelling answers to my nagging questions.

Simply put, homosexuality is not a sin, says Bakker, 35, pastor of Revolution NYC, a Brooklyn evangelical congregation that meets in a bar.

Bakker, who is straight and divorced, crafts his argument using the same "clobber scriptures" (as he calls them) that are so often wielded to condemn homosexuals.

"The simple fact is that Old Testament references in Leviticus do treat homosexuality as a sin ... a capital offense even," Bakker writes. "But before you say, 'I told you so,' consider this: Eating shellfish, cutting your sideburns and getting tattoos were equally prohibited by ancient religious law.

"The truth is that the Bible endorses all sorts of attitudes and behaviors that we find unacceptable (and illegal) today and decries others that we recognize as no big deal."

Leviticus prohibits interracial marriage, endorses slavery and forbids women to wear trousers. Deuteronomy calls for brides who are found not to be virgins to be stoned to death, and for adulterers to be summarily executed.

"The church has always been late," Bakker told me in an interview this week. "We were late on slavery. We were late on civil rights. And now we're late on this."

Examining the original Greek words translated as "homosexual" and "homosexuality" in three New Testament passages, Bakker (and others) conclude that the original words have been translated inaccurately in modern English.

What we read as "homosexuals" and "homosexuality" actually refers to male prostitutes and the men who hire them. The passages address prostitution -- sex as a commodity -- and not same-sex, consensual relationships, he says.”

Cathleen Falsani is author of Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace, The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers and The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.

Oh, My Little Birdie

I have a head cold.  I’m stuffy, but I can breathe through my nose just fine.  My ears are plugged.  I feel tightness in my head.  I have a sore throat, and I’m out of breath and weak.  None of this would particularly contribute to me contemplating my own death, except that I recently experienced perhaps the worst headache I’ve ever had, and it came on just 24 hours after another unbelievably terrible headache.

Now, I get headaches not infrequently, and I have really bad headaches sometimes.  I have not been diagnosed with migraines, but I understand what they are. I’ve had headaches that made me feel sick to my stomach and want to pull my hair out.  The nearly-migraine kind where light hurts and idea of hitting myself with a hammer has fair appeal.  I normally just lie down and sleep it out with an ice bag on my neck.

The night before I had toughed it out in the living room, covered up with a blanket all evening, sipping ginger ale, before my husband made me take a pain reliever/sleeping pill and go to bed at 9:00.  I was crying from the pain and feeling sorry for myself, and when I laid down I had a panic attack and couldn’t breathe.  Little did I know that it was just a warm up for the next day.

This most recent headache was the mother of all that, a black hole of pain sitting in my forehead and behind my right eye.  I left work at 3:00 and was in bed by 3:30 having ingested an ibuprofen and settled the ice gel pack on my neck and shoulder.  Neither helped, but I slept until 6:00 when my daughter woke me.  She needed a ride uptown to buy poster board for school.  I roused up, put on my coat and a pair of clogs, and we set off.  She is unaccustomed to and not supposed to drive my truck (for insurance reasons), otherwise I would have made her do the driving

My hearing was muted in my right ear, and I had to shield my right eye because light was unbearable.  We made it home.  I took an Excedrin and went back to bed at 6:30.  That was when I started contemplating death.

I think I have a pretty high pain tolerance.  I’ve been through labor and also three increasing painful attacks leading up to trip to the ER on New Year’s Day in Mankato revealing that I had a kidney stone.  On the pain scale I rate labor and kidney stone nearly equal.  The headache comes in third, so lying in bed, upset stomach, blinding pain behind my eye, it’s really no wonder that I started thinking dark thoughts.  Maybe I have an aneurysm.  Maybe it’s a brain tumor.  I was applying pressure to my forehead and covering my eye with my left hand and clutching the comforter with my right, crying, sobbing in pain, trying to breathe and finding it really difficult. 

If you can catch the aneurysm early enough, it can sometimes be fixed.  A brain tumor, though, that’s all kinds of unknown.  What kinds of scans do they do?  I was seeing myself with no hair, which doesn’t really bother me.  But what about the radiation and/or chemotherapy.  How bad does that feel?  How much does it all cost?  I don’t want to leave my family in debt.  I don’t want to ruin their lives with my pain and illness and expensive treatments. 

I feel like my husband would learn to be OK if I died.  I think my daughter would have a really bad time of it.  She’s just about to turn 16.  Emotionally, people can recover, but the money and the debt afterward . . . I don’t want that kind of struggle for them.  Even the hardship of coping with someone who is ill, caring for them and still trying to live and work.  I know people do it all the time, but that doesn’t make it easy.

I have thought many times, is this it?  Will today be the day?  For some reason usually when I’m driving, I glance at my right shoulder and ask that question.  It helps me settle my mind. 

“There are many levels of meditation on death. A simple one is to imagine that a little bird is on your shoulder. When you wake up in the morning, you ask the little bird, "Will this be my last day, little bird?" There's a way to do it that is very superficial, but when you think about it, a wisdom arises within you. You then ask the question, "Am I living the life I want to live?" That is the second question that you should ask. This is very superficial, but it is a deeper way to meditate, by asking yourself again, "Am I ready to die?" It's not to make yourself afraid, it's not to make yourself paralyzed or overwhelmed with fear, but by thinking of death - there are several depths and several techniques, depending upon the nature of the problems - it helps people to get stronger, wiser, and more and more realistic toward life, and helps people to enjoy more of the beauty of life.”

I was able to breathe finally and to find tiny spaces where I could relax a little.  Eventually the pain began to subside, and by the time my husband checked on me again around 9:00, the headache was mostly gone.  Today, it’s not a tumor or an aneurysm. 

I feel the little bird though it is almost weightless.  It sees me with a dark, round eye.  I never imagine it with feathers of any specific color.  The little beak opens and closes, but it’s completely silent.