Waiting in the Dark with Steve Lopez's Dad

Posted on July 20, 2011 by tom

Steve Lopez is a columnist with the Los Angeles Times and I often find his columns thought provoking. This past Sunday he wrote a column on his father who is in declining health. I strongly encourage you to read it.

Steve speaks in strong and stirring words about how his 83 year old father has been a man of great strength and pride, and now at 83 years old is reduced to a man who fell one night on his way to the bathroom. Neither he nor his wife were able to get him back on his feet and the result was they spent the night on the floor before they got medical help. Steve wonders if our current health care system will care for his father in a way that honors the man that he is.

I’m afraid it won’t. We have Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor) that is frankly, the socialized medicine we have been warned about. Health care in our sunset years is good at keeping our hearts beating and our lungs inflating, but not good at asking the larger questions. Questions like: “When it is enough? When it is time to recognize that nobody lives forever and we need to change the equation to recognize this.” Questions like: “When are we done keeping you alive at all costs and should instead start thinking about giving you a good death?”

In my experience we’re a long way from that. While we all know in our heads that we will die one day, many of us live as if we were going to be healthy forever and have a right to whatever health care will provide that. At the end of our lives we are the primary drivers of what we want. Assuming we have health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance), we can instruct our health care providers to do whatever we want, even to the point of keeping us alive on a respirator/ventilator. This is a machine that will keep pumping air into our lungs even when every other organ in our bodies has stopped. Most of us won’t choose this if given proper information, but if we can’t communicate and there is nobody to legally advocate for us, most health care providers will assume we want it all, and will keep us alive at any cost.

What’s wrong here? Well, several things. First, I believe that we need to stop thinking of ourselves as immortal. That means that when we are young and healthy we need to start talking with our family members about what we want at the end of our life. If we don’t want to be kept alive on a respirator, or a feeding tube, or by having a paramedic restart our heart, we need to say so and write it down. There are many ways to do this; my favorite is a POLST form. If nothing else, talking with your loved ones about what you want is a good place to start. If things go south in our lives in a hurry, our next of kin is our best ally if we can’t speak for ourselves.

Second, we need to have a national dialogue about how we allocate health care resources. Again, some scream that this will “ration” health care. Let’s face facts: we already ration health care, only we do it now by health care coverage. If you’re 95 years old on Medicare with pancreatic cancer you can get all the chemo, surgery, and radiation that’s available. On the other hand, if you’re 25 years old and work for an employer who doesn’t offer health care, and you have early onset breast cancer, you’re out of luck. It doesn’t matter that your early onset breast cancer is way more curable than pancreatic cancer. It also doesn’t matter that a 25 year old with curable cancer has a much better long term prognosis than a 95 year old with incurable cancer. It only matters on who will pay for this.

To be fair there are doctors and other heath care providers who are heroically telling elderly and terminal patients that they aren’t candidates for aggressive treatments. For their efforts they are sometimes screamed at and threatened by well meaning patients and families who accuse them of being uncaring or greedy when the opposite is true. When President Obama attempted to make this easier by reimbursing doctors for these meetings, Sarah Palin and others called these “death panels.”

As my fellow Baby Boomers are beginning to age into the Medicare problem our numbers are straining the system and at some point we will need to reform it. My prayer is that we come to an understanding of what health care can and cannot do. Providing someone with a good death, free of pain, with the people we love around us, is the last best thing our medical community can do for us.

Sesquicentennial of our Darkest Hour

Posted on April 12, 2011 by tom

Today marks the 150th Anniversary (Sesquicentennial) of the Civil War (or War Between the States, or War of Northern Aggression). No event in our history as a nation says more about who we are than this: the time between April 12, 1861 (the attack of Ft. Sumter) and April 9, 1965 (the surrender at Appomattox) we were a country at war with ourselves. By the time it ended 625,000 of us would be dead (more than died in World War I and II combined).

There are probably more books written about these four years than any other time in our history. Here are suggestions from books I’ve read:

Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt. I read this as a child and it gave a good sense of how the war could divide families
Hidden In Plain Sight: The Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard. This book describes how enslaved slaves used quilts to signal escaped slaves to follow the Underground Railroad
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This book was written by the daughter of an avowed abolitionist and gave Americans of the north an accurate sense of slavery in the south.
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I read this a few years ago and find it the book on the character of the man.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner. This is a stunningly well written book that describes Lincoln’s complex views on slavery and slaves.

Growing up in Northern Virginia (and as an adult living in the city of Manassas) I was struck by how the war continued to live in people who were born 100 years later. I was aware that the war itself was called by different names (Civil War, War Between the States, etc.) and I learned that even the battles had different names: Bull Run vs. Manassas, Chancellorsville vs. Wilderness, and others.

I also learned that the reasons for the war were not in agreement. In the north it was viewed as a war about whether or not slavery would exist, and in the south it was about whether states (who voluntarily joined the union) could leave the union. The more I read the more I’m convinced that slavery is the reality that cannot be ignored.

The roots of the Civil War can (and must be) traced back to the writing of our Constitution. The framers who drafted the Constitution in 1787 faced a dilemma when it came to slaves: how can we say all men are created equal when clearly some are the property of others. Several of framers were slave owners themselves, and while they may have found the institution of slavery distasteful, they participated in it. They also believed that the new nation would not survive if they tried to outlaw slavery. Essentially they punted, and hoped the issue would be resolved in future generations. It is interesting to note one compromise in the 1st Article of the Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years [ie, not slaves, but indentured servants], and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” In other words, if you owned 5 slaves they were counted as 3 persons in the census.

By the time of the Civil War, some 80 years later, slavery had become an institution in the South and most Northerners either had no opinion or found it distasteful but not serious enough to end. It was also a time of Westward expansion into new territories like Missouri and Kansas. Many people in the North, including Abraham Lincoln, wanted to stop slavery where it is and not allow it to move west. Southern slave owners were outraged and believed this discriminated against them. They felt so alienated that they came to the decision that since they voluntarily joined the United States in 1789 they could just as voluntarily pull out and form their own nation. Those in the North disagreed and believed that joining together in 1789 was an irreconcilable covenant that can’t be broken. The war officially started on April 12, 1861 when Southern forces (or members of the newly formed Confederate States of America) began shelling the garrison at Ft. Sumner, South Carolina.

It’s my belief that the South never really believed the North would fight all that hard, and it is generally believed that the South expected a victory in a few weeks or months. It didn’t happen that way. President Lincoln was adamant that the Union be preserved and came only later to the belief that the post war Union would prohibit slavery. By the time the war ended the South was in shambles and the next 12 years would be called “Reconstruction.” In some ways this was as bad a time for the South as the war itself. After President Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865 he was replaced by Andrew Johnson a Southerner who remained in the Senate from Tennessee even after his state seceded. He was a weak man and Radical Republicans made life very difficult in the South. Out of this came a South that wanted to see pre-Civil War days as much better than they were. They saw it as a time when ladies and gentlemen were safe while they cared for slaves who were content with their lives. They denied that the war was about slavery or its westward expansion and that freeing slaves made them into dangerous men roaming the countryside looking for opportunities to harm or kill white people. The 1915 movie Birth of a Nation makes this point and claims the Ku Klux Klan formed as a way of protecting white people from former slaves.

Even today the Confederate Battle Flag draws controversy as some see it as a symbol of slavery while others see it as Southern heritage and tradition.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: 100 Years Later

Posted on March 25, 2011 by tom

Exactly 100 years ago today there was a fire on 29 Washington Place in New York City. The fire was important for a few reasons: the top three floors of the building housed a factory where immigrant women worked 52 hours per week sewing women’s blouses (called shirtwaists); the women had little or no protection for their safety; when a lit cigarette started a fire they were trapped since the doors were locked to prevent theft or the workers from going to the bathroom. There were also no fire alarms; for many of the workers, their first indication of trouble was the fire itself.

By the time the fire was extinguished 146 people were dead; they were either incinerated by the fire or died by jumping to their deaths to escape the flames.

In the aftermath the factory closed. This did not lead owners and managers of factories to institute reforms. It did, however, give unions (particularly the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) and the state legislators the moral authority to institute reforms to protect workers. Among people who belong to unions, this is an important anniversary.

Unfortunately 100 years after the deaths of these 129 women and 17 men, the union cause is again under attack. Union membership continues to decline and unions continue to be seen as impediments to progress. They are not, however, impediments to safety. This anniversary should remind us that union membership has given all of us many of the things we take for granted: the five day work week, the 8 hour day, and basic safeguards against danger.

Let us all pray for the 146 Americans who died 100 years ago today, and thank them for the awareness they gave us. And think about them whenever you see a fire escape.

The Justice Chronicles Volume 6: The Supreme Court rules on Snyder v. Phelps. Unfortunate But Necessary

Posted on March 20, 2011 by tom

I’ve reported on this case before, and on March 2nd the Supreme Court ruled on the case. By a vote of 8-1 the Court upheld the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest at funerals. They have protested at several funerals of young men and women killed in uniform who died in service to our country, including the funeral of Matthew Snyder. The members of the church (who are mainly members of the family of pastor, Fred Phelps) carry signs that say: “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11” or “God Hates Fags.”

The Court ruled that while this speech is clearly offensive and painful, it’s protected by the First Amendment. At the end of the day, I’m afraid I have to say that I agree.

As a Christian I hate the fact that Fred Phelps claims to worship the same God as me. And while I pray for his conversion from a life of hate to a life of love, as an American citizen I believe he has a right to his hate. He has a right to offend me, and large segments of the population.

The final good news here is that all of us also have the right to offend him. Since this case has made national news, several organizations have promised to show up at these same funerals to shout down Phelps, et. al. They also have First Amendment protection.

And Then There Were Three

Posted on September 21, 2010 by tom

On September 8th I got the word I knew was coming, but didn’t want to hear: Uncle Ed passed away quietly at 8:17 a.m. He was 88 years old and had been battling cancer for several years. I’m grateful that he was well cared for by Gardner VNA Hospice and his family.

Uncle Ed is my father’s oldest brother and is one of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. He was 7 years old when the stock market crashed and when he was 16 he dropped out of school to join the Civilian Conservation Corps where he went to Wyoming. I’m not sure of the details, but most boys/men who joined the CCC did so because their families couldn’t afford to feed them. He also spent some time with the Works Progress Administration. His next chapter was determined by the outbreak of World War II. He served in North Africa and Italy. By the way, he was right handed and had a bad right eye. The army didn’t want him because he couldn’t sight a rifle. He taught himself to shoot left handed so he could sight the rifle through his good eye and qualified to join the army. As one who grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, this always amazed me.

Coming home after the war he didn’t have a high school diploma but went immediately to work. He did that until he was 65 when he retired. Like most men of his generation he married, had 2 children, and bought a house. He cared for his parents, joined the VFW, the Gardner Deer Club and Holy Rosary Church.

He was also very good to me. I didn’t travel back for his funeral because of what he did for his country, but what he did for me. When I lived in Boston I used Gardner as a weekend escape. There wasn’t a time that I was in Gardner when he and Aunt Eva didn’t make a place for me at dinner, including Thanksgiving 1980 (the first one where I wasn’t with my family).

With Uncle Ed’s death, the original 7 children are down to 3. The first of them was Uncle Tonto (his name was Andrew but nobody called him that). He died accidentally in 1964 when he was 36.

This picture was taken in 1982. On the bottom are Uncle Norman and my grandmother. The top row (from left to right) are Uncle Joe, Aunt Jeanne, Aunt Freda, my father, and Uncle Ed.

The remaining three are here: Uncle Norman, Aunt Jeanne, and my father.

Note to the remaining three: stay healthy; I don’t want to do this again for a while.

Yes, At My Age I Can Still Be a Happy Camper

Posted on June 29, 2010 by tom

The weekend of June 11-13th was an important few days for me. I didn’t think I would actually go through with it, but I spent that weekend at Camp Marston in Julian, California as a “cabin big buddy” at Camp Erin. It’s a camp for children aged 6-17 who are remembering someone who has died. Oftentimes it’s a parent or a sibling, but it can be anybody.

For lots of reasons I’ve been looking for a place where I can volunteer my gifts, and this looked like a good spot. As many of you know, I’m a chaplain with San Diego Hospice. My work with the terminally ill oftentimes connects with the Center for Grief Care and Education and the ministry they do. I believe that grief is a skill that must be learned and the staff at our Center provides the best education I’ve ever seen. I volunteered to work with boys aged 16 and 17. I know, I know, these are not the easiest people to work with, but they are people who are in need.

I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but when I met the boys/young men I was living with, I knew I had chosen well. It’s been a looooooong time since I was the Youth Minister at All Saints Catholic Church in Manassas, Virginia but the issues hadn’t changed. They still wanted someone who cared about them and I was grateful to provide them with them with that. Given what they’d been through, I was grateful to be the person who cared. I know I didn’t solve all their problems, but maybe I helped them know someone cared about them. Maybe I’ll see them next year.

A Good Day to Thank a Veteran

Posted on May 31, 2010 by tom

Today is the annual commemoration of Veteran’s Day (previously known as Decoration Day). I write about this every year, but it’s a good day to recognize that our freedom isn’t always free. We are who we are and we can do what we do because others have sacrificed for us. This afternoon I spent part of the day walking around Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery doing some work for Findagrave.com. The place was pretty crowded and that was nice to see.

The Loud Pedophilia Scandal and the Deaf Vatican

Posted on April 11, 2010 by tom

The appears to be the scandal that won’t go away, mostly because the Catholic Church can’t seem to get it right. Recent revelations appear to implicate Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) in a scandal to cover up allegations of a pedophile priest, Rev. Peter Hullermann in 1980. You can read the New York Times article for background.

You would expect the Vatican to investigate these allegations, and at the very least issues a “no comment” and hope it blows over. You’d be wrong. On Good Friday, the Pope’s preacher (Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Conv) likened criticism of the Pope to antisemitism, angering both Jews and survivors of sexual abuse. Not to be outdone, on Easter Sunday Cardinal Angelo Sodano compared the publicity on this to gossip. Hard to believe these guys are in charge of anything let alone the Catholic Church.

In the last few days a story has come out about the Diocese of Oakland, Bishop Cummins, and and Fr. Stephen Kiesle. In the early 1980s Fr. Kiesle was convicted of abusing two boys and was removed from ministry. Bishop Cummins wrote to Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) and asked that Fr. Kiesle be laicized, or removed from the priesthood. In fairness there was no attempt by anyone to have Fr. Kiesle returned to ministry. When Cardinal Ratzinger did write, he cautioned against laicizing Fr. Kiesle as it might be a source of scandal to the people of Oakland. Amazingly having a priest abuse boys isn’t scandalous in the Pope’s eyes. The letter goes to to ask Bishop Cummins to provide “as much paternal care as possible.” Did anyone else notice that the Pope never asked about the victims?

This is an issue that is somewhat personal for me. While I was never abused by anyone, I know at least two friends who were sexually abused by priests. I have to believe there were more and I just don’t know about it. I spent most of my early 20s in Boston as a seminarian of the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers; that was in the early 1980s.

I would later find out that I was in the middle of a great deal of abuse, most of which I was to find out about 20 years later. When the Boston Globe started publishing articles in early 2002 I was astounded at how much was happening literally under my nose.

Much of the information I’m discussing now comes from a web page called Bishop Accountability. It’s an amazing page and I’m grateful for all the work it’s taken to keep track of all this.

The one priest I knew about was Fr. Richard Ahern CSS. I was a seminarian when I learned that at Sacred Heart Parish in Feeding Hills he abused several boys. He was pulled out of the parish and sent for treatment at the House of Affirmation in Whitinsville, MA. While there he confessed to the abuse and was arrested. He died on February 1, 2001. I never really liked him and was actually a little surprised when his crimes came to light. Most abusers are charming people who lure their victims; he always struck me as a lazy guy who made a nice living without having to work too hard. I don’t think anyone is happy with how his case was treated (and it still mystifies me why a 20 year old seminarian wasn’t warned about him). Before 1984 the Stigmatines knew about it but didn’t remove him. That year, according to my memory, his abuse was so egregious that he was sent to the House of Affirmation. It was only when he was there and told his story to the therapist he was arrested and the Stigmatines could no longer hide him. I don’t remember the details but they knew they couldn’t send him back to a parish so they gave him an internal job in the community where he wouldn’t have any contact with children. I also remember talk of how to support him; there was also talk of money being paid out to the victims but that always sounded like “hush money” to me. I don’t think they ever recognized how damage he did nor did they see the long term effects of abuse on the victims.

Probably one of the most infamous cases was Fr. Paul Shanley. He wasn’t a Stigmatine, but when I lived in the Stigmatine House of Studies in the early 1980s, Paul was the associate priest at the church next door, St. John the Evangelist in Newton. It was a French parish, and in French it was called St. Jean L’Evangelist. We called it St. Jean and used the American pronunciation. When I first met Paul I couldn’t figure out why an Irishman like Paul was assigned to a French parish, and why he wasn’t a pastor. He explained to me that he had a fight with Cardinal Humberto Medeiros and was told he’d never be pastor. That was true, as far as it goes, but Paul didn’t tell me that the fight was over Paul’s abuse of teenage boys. When Cardinal Meideros died in 1983 and the pastor of St. Jean’s died shortly after, Cardinal Bernard Law appointed Paul as pastor of St. Jean’s. By that time I was gone and that was where most of the abuse occurred. I taught CCD (Sunday School) at St. Jean’s and leaned that Paul did most of his damage to students of the school who were sent to him for disciplinary reasons. It was generally my policy to take care of disciplinary stuff in the classroom and I don’t remember sending anyone to Paul but I was grateful to see that none of my students were Paul’s victims. I’m still angry that Paul and Cardinal Meideros conspired to lie to me (and the parish) over why he was assigned to St. Jean’s. Paul was convicted in 2005 and is still in prison.

At some point the Catholic Church needs to find a way to deal with this and it will be a hard road. But we won’t start of this journey as long as we’re still more concerned with protecting the clergy than protecting our children.

Snyder vs. Phelps, and the Outrage Continues

Posted on April 5, 2010 by tom

In a previous post I talked about a case that is incredibly polarizing. The news since that post is equally polarizing. The latest court ruling favors Fred Phelps and his church. It’s on hold until the Supreme Court hears the case next term, but Matt’s father Albert has been handed a bill for $16,510 to pay to the defendant, Fred Phelps.

From what I’ve been able to read, this was the order of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. They argue that if you bring a civil suit against someone and lose, you’re responsible for their legal costs. In the abstract that makes sense; it should cut down on frivolous lawsuits and protect defendants from being bankrupted. It should deter someone with financial means to destroy someone who lacks financial means. But I find it puzzling that the 4th Circuit is demanding payment while the case is still on appeal.

Mr. Snyder makes a good case that he cannot afford the legal bill, but it’s unlikely that he’ll actually have to pay it.

If he ultimately wins the case he’ll receive damages from Fred Phelps much in excess of this amount.
You can click on Matt’s memorial web page and send a donation
Bill O’Reilly, who is somebody I’m normally contemptuous of, has promised to pay the bill. It’s rare that I applaud Bill, but I do this time.

I’ll keep you posted.

Uncle Joe: Couldn't You Spend Christmas With Us?

Posted on December 29, 2009 by tom

This past year has been a tough one for my father’s side of the family. We lost two of my aunts, Aunt Freda and Aunt Lempi in the winter and spring. The day before Christmas Eve we leaned that my Uncle Joe died. He had congestive heart failure and squeezed a great deal of life out his body; as a matter of fact he died after climbing a flight of stairs. The good news is that his nephew John was with him and told us that Uncle Joe didn’t suffer.

Even though he had a long life it’s still tough to lose someone right around the holidays. His death gave this Christmas a tinge of sadness. It’s also hard when it’s winter in Massachusetts. Uncle Joe’s wake is starting as I write this (from sunny and warm San Diego) and the current temperature in Gardner, MA is 11° F. I doubt that most of his family will even be able to attend.

My father is the youngest of seven, and one of four surviving. As a group they’ve been blessed with length of years, if not always good health. Uncle Joe was a case in point. He’s had heart failure for a number of years and needed to be on oxygen for a long time. Had he lived a hundred years ago it’s pretty clear that he wouldn’t have lived this long, and I sometimes wonder if his extra years were a blessing to him. It was certainly good to see him on my infrequent visits to Gardner and I’ll certainly miss him when I’m there next but I think it’s a fair question whether our current state of health care has served him well.

This is probably grist for another post, but our health care system is good at keeping our hearts beating, and moderately good at pain relief. We are also good at providing equipment to keep us mobile (e.g. oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.). But we’re not as good at helping people stay healthy and avoid getting sick. Well, more later.

The Thoughts and Musings of Tom Allain

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Category Archives: Grieving