How Long To Wait For A Miracle?

I remember the moment I finally knew Mom was dying.

She had cancer-related hallucinations that afternoon, her watery eyes searching mine as she told me about strangers who kept entering her room and long-ago loved ones who had come to call.

Her hand was weightless in mine as I led her to the bathroom, her step tottering and slow like an infant’s. My mother had become a ghastly shadow of the woman she once was, had become frail and small with an awful, lovely delicacy like the petals of dead flowers. And as I was thinking those things, there came a moment of clarity. She looked up at me, eyes filled with an infinite sadness that said simply: “I know.”

I got out of there as quickly as I could, driving fast as if to escape the sudden knowledge that no miracle was forthcoming, no divine intervention in the works. Finally I pulled over on the freeway, unable to see for the tears.

Mom died April 15, 1988.

Physician-assisted suicide wasn’t an issue then. There was no Dr. Jack Kevorkian making headlines, no forces pro and con squaring off before the Supreme Court. If my mother, bloated and bald and suffering agony beyond imagining, had asked a doctor to end her life, I like to think I would have objected, but I can’t say for certain.

For that matter, if illness ever transported me to a universe of pain where no doctor saw the slightest hope of recovery, I like to think I’d still want to live. But I can’t be sure about that, either.

I can be both pro and con on this issue, sometimes in the span of a single heartbeat.

Any certainty I have withers in the face of questions I can’t answer:

How much pain is too much?

At what point does defending life become an act of cruelty?

When is it right to give up hope?

Against those good and difficult questions, I can only stack a long-held belief. Call it faithful or call it foolish - it’s probably both - but I’ve always felt that so long as a human being draws breath, there is a chance for the unforeseeable to happen.

Indeed, that was the moral of an unrelated story that unfolded even as the Supreme Court began to hear arguments on the issue of assisted suicide. It seems two Hawaii men, Richard Enslow Jr. and David Summers, were on a fishing trip when their boat sank. The Coast Guard searched for them, then gave them up for lost. Their families resigned themselves to the likelihood of death.

The hours piled up and became days and the days became weeks.

But after nearly a month at sea, Enslow and Summers were found alive and well just a few days ago.

I don’t mean to be saccharine or simplistic, only to suggest that a sense of the possible is a precious thing. You may think you know how an episode is going to turn out, but in the words of Fats Waller, one never knows, does one? That’s why we read the story to the end, run the race to the finish line - to find out what happens. We live our lives in search of answers and expectation of the occasional miracle. And so we don’t easily foreclose the future - we leave open a sense of the possible.

But maybe physician-assisted suicide - or some similar option for terminally ill patients - is something else we ought to leave open.

I grant you there’s a contradiction in those sentiments, especially since, as noted, I like to think I’m against the thing. But that’s just the point. A person cannot truly know, is unqualified to resolve the contradiction until he has answered - in fact, not theory - those good and difficult questions about pain, cruelty and hope.

I don’t know that I ever could. There is too much stubbornness in me.

Because you know what? That day on the freeway when I choked on the realization that sat like ashes in my throat … call it faithful or call it foolish, but I think I still hoped a little, even then.

xxxx