Taking comfort in Christ’s resurrection

MICHELE MARR

Three years ago I wrote a column for Maundy Thursday when, like this

year, the orange tree in my backyard was in bloom. The lilac and the

roses were only beginning to bud, insinuating spring -- unlike this

year with its powerful rains that have caused the roses and the lilac

to be long profuse with flowers.

That column told about the “new commandment” Jesus gave his

disciples at their last meal together: “Love one another ... as I

have loved you.” It described the length of days between the

observance of Easter in Western and Eastern Christendom. Three years

ago, 32 days stretched between the two; this year, there’s 34.

Mostly, though, the column was about how three Huntington Beach

families -- the families of Chelsea Toma, Nancy Le and Jill Michelle

Baedeker -- each buried a daughter, killed by a drunken driver named

James Paul Bell, during Holy Week that year. Above all, it was about

the unyielding hope I observed at the Holy Monday Funeral Mass of

Resurrection held for Jill Baedeker at St. Bonaventure Roman Catholic

Church.

I couldn’t help but remember that Mass and its hope last week each

time I checked news updates in the story of Terri Schiavo.

Schiavo isn’t as stunningly young as were Toma, Le and Baedeker,

who were only 18 and 19 years old. She was already in her mid-20s

when she collapsed and fell into a coma.

And Schiavo’s death will not be, like the deaths of those three

local teens, shockingly sudden.

On Maundy Thursday, Schiavo’s parents and siblings were keeping

watch as their daughter and sister, deprived of her feeding tube and

hydration, began to starve and dehydrate.

Almost seven years ago, my mother and I were keeping a similar

vigil as my father lay in a hospital bed, in the house we once had

all shared, letting go of his increasingly fragile grip on this

world. His feeding tube had been removed toward the end of an

impossible-to-win skirmish with cancer. There was little left for us

to do, save for keeping him physically comfortable and loving him to

the end.

We held his hands; we spoke close to his ears. In weary shifts, we

wiped his face with a cool, moist cloth and exchanged dry, plump

pillows for his compressed and damp ones.

We swabbed his parched and cracking lips and turned him every 30

minutes to stave off bedsores. On a frail, atrophied body they can

appear that fast.

But there were comforting distinctions between our watch and that

Schiavo’s family now keeps, and on Maundy Thursday, I was grateful

for them all over again.

My mother and my sister, who could not be with us during those

final days, and I each knew my father’s wishes, and we were

single-minded about them. He wanted to die at home. He wanted to be

with us as long as he could, but he wanted no extraordinary measures

to hold him here when it was time to go.

My father’s feedings were not discontinued -- and it was never

suggested to us they should be -- until his body refused the food we

were giving him, pushing it instead out of his stomach and back up

the tube, clearly doing no good and creating added discomfort.

A feeding tube, while initially surgically enabled, is not an

extraordinary measure any more than, say, an ileostomy or catheter

is. A body still healthy enough to make use of nutriment takes food

from a feeding tube as easily and eagerly as an infant takes a

bottle.

Even after his feedings were necessarily stopped, my father was

never denied hydration, though he reached a point when his skin

wilted and dried even with the benefit of intravenous fluids. Hospice

workers taught us how to give him morphine to stay his pain. No one

denied that without it, he would suffer.

I don’t want to imagine how much more painful our vigil would have

been had we been forced, like Schiavo’s family, to remove my father’s

feeding tube while it was still keeping him alive. I don’t want to

imagine having to beg for his pain to be relieved.

Instead, I pray that Terri Schiavo’s loved ones, being Roman

Catholics, are holding tight the same unyielding hope I was blessed

to obverse at Jill Baedeker’s funeral Mass three years ago.

That morning Fr. Jarek Zaniewski reminded those in attendance that

we must see circumstances through our faith. We must remember that

God is good and that he is there for us even when circumstances are

cruel.

It’s the same hope I imagine Jesus’ mother Mary clutched at the

foot of his cross.

At Jill Baedeker’s funeral, her sister Emily offered these words

she believed Jill would have offered herself, “I have been waiting

for heaven and God has opened the door.”

This week Christians worldwide continue to celebrate Easter,

Jesus’ resurrection, greeting one another with “Christ is risen. He

is risen indeed.”

My father and Jill Baedeker are now at peace, safe with the risen

Christ. Soon, so will be Terri Schiavo.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].