Those of you who have read my column with any regularity know that I have a 37-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy and mental retardation, Dawn, who lives three hours away from me in The Virginia Home in Richmond. I see her at least every other weekend and have her in my mind and heart every other minute of my life.
As we have visited her the last 12 years, my mother and I have become friends with many of the other residents who live there and try their best to enjoy the lives they have been given. One of these residents is a man named “Dan,” who often comes to Dawn’s room while we are there and visits with us.
Dan was injured many years ago—I think 37—in an accident that broke his neck, leaving him in a wheelchair and with limited use of his hands. His mind sharp and wit quick, he has until recently worked as a tax accountant during tax season. He likes pretzels and pickled eggs and saves bags of potato chips to offer to children who come to visit.
We have sympathized with him the last couple of years as he has suffered through at least one surgery for continuing shoulder pain and other medical ailments associated with his paralysis. Yesterday, however, he told us of his latest health issues and a horrendous choice he has had to make.
I’m a writer not a neurosurgeon, but as I understand it, a spinal fusion close to his brain stem at the top of his spine is deteriorating. That part of the brain controls the vital life functions such as breathing needed to keep a person alive..
This good, gentle man’s choices are to have surgery which the doctor said would probably leave him on a respirator and IV feeding for an “indefinite amount of time” or to live at the most another year before his heart ceases to beat.
“What did you decide to do?” I asked, a feeling of dread in my chest.
“I don’t want to be on a respirator and to be fed through IVs,” he said. “I choose the year.”
I wanted to cry, both because of the sadness of the situation and the bravery with which he spoke.
I don’t even know what his religious beliefs are, but he said, “I’m not afraid of dying.”
“It’s got to be better than this life,” I said, trying to be reassuring while squelching my own nervousness about dying, even in face of my deeply religious beliefs about an after-life.
He readily agreed.
To Dan the two choices were clear: a virtual death in life or life through death. Neither one was probably a choice he would have proffered at his age had he been crafting them.
But that’s how choices often are. For those of us committed to a Christ-like life, the choices are very seldom between pure evil and pure goodness, the easiest choices to make. More often the choices are between good and good, between unappealing and unappealing, or between throwing up our hands in despair and soldiering on as best we can into an unseen future.
As best as he can, Dan is choosing the way of faith and trusting his heart and God. He is, without even knowing it, following Pres. Harold B. Lee’s counsel to “Walk to the edge of the light, and perhaps a few steps into the darkness, and you will find that the light will appear and move ahead of you” [quoted by Bonnie D. Parkin in General Conference April 1997].
In the quietness of that conversation, I paused to feel God in the room and to be changed forever through a new respect for courage revealed in difficult decisions. Then I turned back to my task of folding laundry, while Dan and my mother joked a bit before he turned his wheelchair towards his room to live out the rest of his choice until he can soon stand again and walk into the light.
