euthanasia – Pam Thorson

The place where “there’s no way forward” meets “God is enough.”

In the rarified air of the unknown, we walk with feet of clay, scale crags on bloodied knees, and reach up to touch the face of God from the dirt.

In this place, every life is precious. Every tear is gathered into God’s vessel, to be poured out upon the feet of the Savior who carries us each step of the journey home. Here it’s okay to be broken. In fact, it’s better, because…

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
And saves those who are crushed in spirit. -Psalm 34:18

My mother’s strokes in 1989 first introduced me to the world of disability. When a doctor wanted to “let her die” because, he told me, her life was “useless,” I learned the fight for life is as primal as it gets. Her condition wasn’t terminal, just inconvenient.

Those years prepared me for a harder path. In 1997, our son Kevin suffered a near-fatal spinal cord injury in Canada. He was instantly paralyzed from the neck down and stopped breathing. Someone provided CPR and kept him alive until help arrived. It was a miracle he survived long enough to be life-flighted to a hospital in Calgary.

Soon the word “impossible” began to be tossed at us, first at the Calgary hospital as the doctor made his case for euthanasia, then later at the rehabilitation hospital in the States. As God helped Kevin conquered each impossible, new ones sprang up before us. He almost died two more times in the early weeks post-injury. As each stone rolled away from the decree of death, new obstacles littered our path.

That pattern has not changed in the twenty-four years we have journeyed this road. Each day, we face the impossible. Each day, God makes a way.

As we trudge the slopes of disaster, I gather the gems from the muck and put them with my treasures. I’ve learned how much God loves people and seen the intensity with which He invests in life. Whether I’m writing about parenting or caregiving or the stories of the elders, I am blessed to find the colors of life burst upon the dark canvas of struggle.

Whatever your story is, I’m glad you’re here.

Life is a gift. Let’s treasure what we have in this moment and trust God to keep eternity safe for us, for the day when the lame walk and God dries our tear-stained faces.

That day’s coming. Until then, we will conquer whatever comes, together. No matter what you’re going through right now, you can be assured you are never, ever alone. You’re important to God, and you’re important to me.

By PamThorson0 comments

Caregiving Every Life Matters Song in the Night

February 17, 2016

What One “Useless Life” Taught Me

Just an old woman.

She lay against the stark white sheets of the gurney, her face gray and her hands bent awkwardly inward. A series of strokes had long-silenced her lilting Southern twang, and she communicated much as an infant, her cries and grunts only distinguishable to the initiated. At the sight of me, her face contorted in a pathetic wail, brownish-red drool drizzling from one corner of her mouth.

“Pneumonia,” someone at the nursing had said two hours earlier, when they first called to tell me that they were sending my mother to the hospital. I had quickly arranged my schedule to meet her at the emergency room when she arrived. My brother joined me in the waiting room, and we watched in vain for her arrival. Finally I checked again at the desk and discovered she had not yet been sent down from the nursing home.

I called the home, and they said they were still awaiting the doctor’s order to transport her down. We waited some more. I called the doctor’s office to see what was happening. No one knew. After two hours, she finally landed in the emergency room, where she lay untreated as busy nurses and techs buzzed around the nurses’ station. I could only guess they were waiting for doctor’s orders to proceed.

She continued to cry. We continued to wait. I stood at her side, stroking her hair and murmuring meaningless words of comfort as I choked back angry tears.

No one ever came in the room to care for her.

Something was definitely wrong, and I finally lost my patience. I summoned my nerve and marched out to the nurses’ station. “Is Doctor in the hospital?” I asked the startled nurses.

“Uh, I can try to page him for you,” one of them ventured.

“Fine. I want to talk to him.”

They exchanged nervous glances and had him on the phone in short order.

“This is Opal Soyk’s daughter,” I spit out. “We have been waiting hours in E.R. to have her treated. What the h— is going on?”

My rare foray into profanity surprised even me. But Doctor was up to the fight. “I wasn’t planning to bring her down here. She’s only here because you insisted.”

I was momentarily confused by the direction of the conversation. After all, I was only there because I had been called by the nursing home. What was going on? My mind raced to untangle what had happened as I asked, “Well, what are you planning to do for her?”

One worthless life…

“Nothing. I wasn’t going to treat her. She’s an old woman. Her life is useless, anyway. Why do you want to keep her alive?”

My soul exploded into little shards of red-hot pain as clarity came. He had planned to let her die untreated in her bed at the nursing home.

But this was not a useless old woman. This was my mother.

All my life, my mother had fought for me. Always, unconditionally, and without reservation, Mother had been my champion and protector. It was time to return the honor.

“That is not your decision to make,” I retorted loudly, turning heads at the nurses’ station. “Your job is to treat her.”

Doctor hung up on me.

He never did bother to show up at the emergency room. But shortly afterward, she was admitted to the hospital. With proper treatment, Mother recovered from her illness and lived some time longer before dying peacefully at the nursing home with her family in attendance.

Who Is the Lord of Life and Death?

In the months leading up to her strokes, Mother knew something awful was happening in her body. She kept it mostly secret, but looking back, I realized that she was preparing us for the inevitable. One day she told me that if anything happened to her, she wanted every chance at life. She also said, “I changed your diapers; you can change mine.”

I remembered those words after her strokes, and I was thankful to know her wishes. But I often agonized as I watched her body slowly wither away. I knew, though, that if we hastened her death, it would not be her choice, but ours. That would be neglect. Or worse.

In the long nights during those five years, I reminded God that she had taken Him to be Lord of her life. I asked Him to be Lord of her death.

The last night the nursing home called us, she had fallen into a coma after not responding to medication for a new infection. Her body showed the obvious signs of shutting down. We gathered around her bed, sang all her favorite hymns, and cheered her on. We read Scriptures to her, prayed quietly, and loved her into God’s presence.

My mother taught me how to live. She taught me how to die. And she taught me that God is the Lord of both.

By PamThorson2 comments

Caregiving Every Life Matters Song in the Night

February 10, 2016

The Gift of Existence

It would have been so much easier to die.

Kevin Thorson lay paralyzed in the grass of a church lawn in Canada. Moments earlier, he was practicing backflips with a friend when he missed a rotation, fell on his head, and broke his neck nearly at his skull. As a friend ran for help, he lay there alone, not breathing, fading into blackness as he fell unconscious.

He told us later that it was at that moment, when he felt himself near death, that the presence of God came to him. The sense of the next world was intensely powerful, forever making this side of the veil seem the impostor. It would have been quick, even merciful, to have slipped quietly away to join God.

But God wasn’t there to take him to heaven.

Instead, He had a message for Kevin. A voice so real Kevin thought it was audible told him, “You’re going to be okay.”

He awakened not okay. He was in a desperate fight for his life. Emergency personnel worked feverishly to keep him alive until he could be put on life support. He endured a helicopter ride to a larger hospital in Calgary, a doctor’s push for euthanasia, surgeries, pneumonia, bronchoscopy, paralysis, loss of privacy, and much pain in the first weeks before he returned home.

Later he endured serious infections that landed him in intensive care. He had more surgeries for kidney stones. He spent two years on the ventilator before weaning off it on days, something that had been declared an impossibility by his doctors. He regained more than they expected, but not enough for a normal life.

The loss was profound. It came in layers as the reality of the depth of his disability struck home. Some days he grieved over the dreams he would never see realized. Other days he longed for just the feel of grass beneath his feet again.

But as victories came, like breathing on his own and taking his first steps and running a computer, there was a stirring in his soul. He began to truly appreciate being alive. Watching him struggle to live out his faith despite profound brokenness, I began to see how completely God had brought to pass what He promised Kevin: He would be okay.

Today I understand this: Existence, in all its facets, is a gift.

It is the man who has been told he would never breathe on his own who appreciates the feeling of air in his lungs.

It is the man who has endured great pain who appreciates a day when his body is at peace.

It is the man who once lost all feeling who takes joy in the warmth of the sun on his arms, the softness of a kitten’s fur beneath his fingers, and his legs under him again as he takes his first shaky steps.

It is the man who has had everything taken away who treasures anything given back.

It is in loss that we understand the gift.

To exist is to be. We are made in mirror image of our Creator, who calls Himself the great “I AM.” We were made to experience. We were made to feel, to love, to laugh, to hurt.

Those who say, “I would never want to live like that” must give room to those who do want to live, even if it is “like that.” The disabled and the vulnerable and the aged and the pre-born have no duty to die because their existence is inconvenient for others.

Yes, it would have been easier for Kevin to die that awful day in 1997. But what richness of life we would have missed in knowing him. The world is a better place because he exists.