If You Had a Short Time Left to Live

What would you do if you only had a short time left to live? This actually happened to me, except I survived.  What I thought I would do and what I did, in fact, do were not the same things.

My extended brush with death came about when I had congestive heart failure, brought on by treatment for thyroid cancer. Since I was not really a candidate for congestive heart failure, and hadn’t even heard of it, by the time I sought medical treatment I was, as the doctor said, gravely ill. Hearts have an ejection fraction, which is a measurement of how well they pump out blood. A normal ejection fraction is between 55 and 70. When it drops down to 40 you get diagnosed and start medication. At my first doctor visit my ejection fraction was 7. It rarely happens that someone with a heart as sick as mine was survives, but I did.

There was no sudden healing. I endured a year of simply not dying that day. I expected it at any moment. Everything I did felt like the last time. There was one day when I came awfully close to death. I was in the car with my family and my heart went into an odd rhythm unlike common pvc palpitations. I felt the blood drain out of my head and started to quietly black out. Then it started beating normally again. My heart had fibrillated. It was terrifying.

This is what I would have thought I would do when faced with my own death, and what I actually did.

1     Upon hearing a diagnosis of probable imminent death I thought I would rapidly cycle through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead I skipped right past denial and didn’t have the energy to be angry. I followed all the doctor’s instructions to the letter, which I suppose could be construed as bargaining. Then for a while I was plucky: I’m going to beat this! Depression came later and was massive. It has been seven years and I still haven’t completely reached the acceptance point. After I survived I wallowed around in depression for years, then circled back to anger. Acceptance is on my to-do list – not acceptance that I was going to die, since I didn’t, but acceptance that such a thing could ever have happened to me. I protest! I’m against it! As for denial, which I had skipped in the first place, my husband has that one covered.

2    Emotional reactions aside, it seems like the first thing you would do is get your affairs in order. The reality is that if you’re so sick you’re about to die you just don’t have it in you to worry about consolidating bank accounts, updating wills, and so forth. The life lesson here is to keep your affairs in order all the time. Also remember that eventually someone else is going to go through all your drawers.

3    Wouldn’t your imminent death be a great time to say all those things to people you’d been needing to say? Some things, yes. I think I told my family a billion times how much I love them, which wasn’t really news. But when my heart was barely beating the last thing I needed to be doing was to call up an old boyfriend or someone else from my past and hash things out or say what they’d meant to me. If you’re too chicken to say something now you’re not going to be less chicken when you’re at death’s door. Let’s be realistic.

4    About that bucket list – do it now. Sick people don’t tick off items on the list. After I was doing better I did start work on the novel I always meant to write, and I’m still working on it.

5   They say your life flashes before your eyes, and I have to agree with that, except for the flashing part. Since I seemed to be dying a slow death my life spun out for me slowly. Many memories came back to me of who I was at all the stages of my life.

What else?

I condensed my life down to just my family. I decided I wasn’t going to spend my remaining time yelling at my kids about homework and videogames, but to make sure they knew how much I loved them. Nor was I going to spend it worrying about my diet, other than the low-sodium diet the doctor had prescribed. Cleaning house? I mostly couldn’t, so we hired cleaners and said that was clean enough.

I reevaluated my religion, throwing out much of the religion and keeping Jesus. I saw through a lot of big talkers. I saw who really cared about me. I saw plain as day that God had His hand on me. I stopped letting people waste my time with immature lessons on spirituality.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft. If you are inclined to scoff, watch this TED talk, which talks about how playing games increases your resilience and decreases depression: http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life.html I hadn’t seen the TED talk when I started, but my kids were playing WoW and I was doing lots of things with them. I found that the social aspect, the reward system, etc., of games were keeping me feeling strong and positive.

What do you think you would do if you knew you had a short time left to live?

A Married Christian Woman on Gay Marriage

... and it's not what you think.

I was reared in a very liberal part of the country, and have spent some of my life in the theater milieu. However, I made Jesus the Lord of my life, which usually places me with a conservative crowd. Because of the hand I've been dealt it's not for me to accept any pat answers or slogans about a lot of political issues. I have to think things through for myself. 

The main argument my fellow Christians make against gay marriage is that they believe the Bible is opposed to homosexuality. I’m not going to argue about that. I’ve read some interesting verse-by-verse interpretations that have a different perspective, particularly about some passages in Leviticus. If you want an overview of the variety of opinions Bible scholars have adopted on the subject you can start here if you like. http://peacetheology.net/homosexuality/the-homosexuality-debate-two-streams-of-biblical-interpretation/ I’m not a Hebrew scholar nor conversant in ancient Greek, and I’m dependent on translators like most of us are. All I can do when I come across contentious points is to fall back on what is absolutely clear. God loves us all. We are all sinners. We need to forgive one another and be patient with one another. We need to love one another.

The public face of Christianity has done a very, very poor job of showing love to homosexuals. It can be argued that the enemy magnifies this is in people’s minds. It can also be argued that the worst offenses are committed by people who invoke the name of Christ only as a rallying cry and have not submitted much of their heart to Him at all. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that anti-gay behavior of every sort continues to happen, and televangelists continue to make money declaring that God doesn’t allow the sexually immoral into Heaven. Point of clarification: God doesn’t allow any sinners into Heaven, including liars. This is why Jesus was sent to atone for our sins and wipe our records clean - liars and the sexually immoral alike.

The second argument people make in opposition to gay marriage is that our laws should be based on Bible principles. I don’t even know where to begin with this one. Our laws are not based on Bible principles now. If they were it would be illegal to dishonor one’s parents, or to take the Lord’s name in vain. Our prison population would be unsustainable. Add to the roll call everyone who had said something untrue and harmful about someone else. These three examples are among the Ten Commandments, the most important and clear-cut of all God’s Laws. What can you say about the American economy, which is largely based on coveting what others have? This is not illegal. The law of the land and the Laws of God have not been in complete harmony since Israel was a theocracy, thousands of years ago. Much has changed in those years, not the least of which is Jesus’ arrival, bringing forgiveness of sins and a call to not only follow God’s laws but to love one another and forgive them. He placed his Holy Spirit in the ones who followed him, which, in part, brings ethics into the heart of the individual. Jesus didn’t come and rewrite the laws of the Romans. His was a different Kingdom. Governments come and go. They can be fairly good and they can be downright evil. We can’t expect the government to be the arbiter of morality. Nothing good can come of allowing our ethics to be determined by a system of government. Government is about power, both in the way it’s acquired and how it controls people. As Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The third reason we often hear for prohibiting homosexual marriage is that it erodes the foundation of a sacred institution and the family. I’m sorry to say, that ship has left the harbor. As most people know, the current divorce rate in the U.S. is about 50%. The rate for church-attending Christians is not much different (Barna says one thing, other researchers say another). In 1965 the percent of people 25-34 who were married was around 80%, but by 2010, when living together had become commonplace, it had dipped to around 44%. http://www.prb.org/Articles/2010/usmarriagedecline.aspx Assuming half of those marriages end in divorce, that leaves 22% of Americans following the heterosexual married-for-life plan. When heterosexuals accuse homosexuals of eroding the foundation of a sacred institution I am reminded of Jesus telling his disciples that before they point out that someone else has a spec in his eye they should remove the plank in their own.

A fourth claim in opposition to gay marriage that sometimes comes up has to do with the financial impact of all the people who would now be eligible to receive government benefits that weren’t before. A recent poll shows that only about 3.4% of Americans identify as gay. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/10/19/how_many_americans_are_gay_or_lesbian_gallup_survey_says_3_4_percent.html It’s likely that it will mostly (but not exclusively) be lesbians who are interested in marriage. So we aren’t looking at a lot of people compared to the number of heterosexuals who have willingly given up heterosexual marriage benefits.

The fifth claim, and the last I will address, is that when you give an inch they’ll take a mile. Once we capitulate on gay marriage they will be clamoring for legalizing incest and pedophilia. I say, let them clamor. The American people make a big distinction between something that affects children, and a “victimless crime,” and they will not cave in to either of these. Lately there have been articles circulating about the legalization of gay marriage in Canada, and pastors and others being arrested for speaking out against it. We are not Canada. Freedom of speech is a Constitutional right here, and something we must protect.

My radical proposal is this: the government needs to get out of the business of defining what marriage is. Everything that is now called “marriage” under law should be rewritten as “civil union.” A civil union would be a legally binding relationship between any two consenting adults for whatever reason they choose. The sacred institution of marriage would be completely under the authority of the religious sector. It would look like this:

 - A Christian or other religious couple wants to get married, so they apply for a civil union like they do a marriage license, and they go through a marriage ceremony in their church

 - A non-religious couple wants to get married, so they apply for the civil union, and do whatever they want for a ceremony (an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, absolutely nothing, etc.), but there is no “marriage,” with all the promises before God that they have no intention of keeping

There will be people who are married in some very weird religions you don’t agree with, but if they find a religious authority to marry them, that is the way it will be.

I didn’t go where you thought I was going, did I? You thought I was making a case in favor of homosexual marriage, when what I’m actually doing is saying that marriage in America is so broken that it’s too late to make it more “sacred” by barring someone from it. True sacred marriage needs to be lifted out of the mire into which all these disposable marriages have sunk. I don’t see the government being of any use whatsoever in doing it.

What makes a marriage sacred is the vow you make with your spouse and God. There is no sacred institution. Our Founding Fathers wisely separated church and state.

Finally, if you are a Christian and you don't feel terrible about the treatment gay people have historically received, and continue to receive, then you need to wake up. Seems to me we should be binding the broken-hearted. But that could be the topic of a whole other blog.