Submitted by Gayle
A friend of mine, aged 59, lies in the hospital in what is probably the end stages of coronary artery disease. The long and winding road to this status is marked with a plethora of bad decisions. Born into the chaotic world of two alcoholics, his young life was characterized by emotional neglect and was devoid of any role modeling of perseverance, integrity, or wisdom. Launched into adulthood without a high school diploma and only military experience as any sort of preparation for a successful life, he opted for heroin addiction and the comprehensive pathology which it ensures.
Unable to hold a job for any length of time, he nevertheless married and fathered three children who were soon removed from him and adopted by others. Numerous incarcerations at the county and state level littered his prime adult years, interspersed with homelessness or minimal living conditions. In his mid-forties he finally got clean and cobbled together the semblance of a normal life. He still could not sustain employment, however, and physical problems began to plague him. Between the VA and SSDI, he has had literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of surgeries (including a triple bypass), procedures, and rehabilitation efforts. The criminal justice system provided glasses and dentures and job training. He has had four failed marriages and has not succeeded by any other measure of manhood.
I tell you his life story not to invite judgment, but to use him as an example of the difficulties in assessing how to extend mercy (both individually and collectively) to someone. After his bypass, he was ordered to quite smoking. He did not quit smoking, and so more expensive treatments are needed to save his life at the present time. This is on top of a lifetime of abusing his body in other significant ways. When is it appropriate to cease being merciful and who gets to decide? Where is the line where mercy morphs into enabling?
I know a very young unmarried couple, poor as church mice, who had a baby recently. The baby had severe malformations of the heart. This poor child has spent the first three months of its life in Neonatal Intensive Care, undergoing surgeries and endless procedures, and at last report was classified as “stable”. At times she has required one-on-one nursing care. The parents come and stare at her every day – no touching to speak of – and then go home. The medical bill for this baby must be in the stratosphere. Where is the line where mercy twists into torture?
Another young couple -married – I know are pregnant. Ultrasound has just revealed their daughter will be born with a heart having only one chamber instead of four. The series of surgeries she will need to construct some sort of working organ will begin almost immediately after birth. If all goes well, she can be expected to live until her early teens. Where is the line where mercy becomes a usurper of the proper natural order of things?
Mercy is a beautiful word. We all need mercy to some degree some of the time and are glad to get it. The one who extends mercy is rewarded by expending time and resources to help another who cannot return the favor, at least not now. Unless mercy has boundaries, however, it is easily abused and becomes something else. At a societal level, for example, we see the cruel results of extending unending mercy to women who choose to have multiple children without benefit of a committed father on the scene. Good mercy requires some system of accountability, but the lines for that are as elusive as a wisp of smoke. Good mercy produces positive results, and stupid mercy produces disaster.
I have an example of good mercy. In my extended family, a daughter was born with severe spinal bifida. She spent her life hunched over in a wheelchair, helpless to do much of anything but use her bright mind. Her parents and older siblings extended prodigious amounts of love and mercy to her, but I know it was tempered with accountability because of her unspoiled nature and the good humor with which she lived her life. She had many friends, and was actually popular with her classmates. In seventh grade she was allowed to get her hair dyed blue. In eighth grade, she was invited to a Halloween party, and the keen sense of irony she had developed about her circumstances was evident when she chose to costume herself as Lady Gaga. A few months later a swift case of pneumonia took her. She is sorely missed for the joys she beamed out to those in her orbit, the results of good and appropriate mercy.
I am no proponent of arbitrary medical rationing. I am all for a society that has structures to offer compassion to those who need it. But mercy demands intelligent definition and distribution. Mercy is easily apprehended by those who use it for devious ends and by those who don’t recognize some of the naturally occurring deficits in human nature, like laziness. Bad mercy is outrageously expensive.
I am about to go down to Mexico for the weekend to offer some mercy to some really destitute people. Is it good mercy? I think so, but some might argue.
