No, Virginia. There is no Santa Claus. And YES, Virginia. They are going to pull grandma’s plug. You are a child, so I’ll say this slowly. Your parents, and their adult co-conspirators, have peppered your tiny brain with stories. Really stupid stories. And you believed them because you’re a child, and like children everywhere, you don’t have the foundational experience or the practice in logical thought that grownups are supposed to possess.
Poor little stupid, stupid Virginia. She’s never seen anyone get old and die. She’s never had to face death and realize that it’s an inevitable part of life. She is a rudimentary life form in this big wide world. She’s never wiped and powdered someone’s behind as they lay dying, so they don’t get painful, oozing bedsores. She’s never had to keep an eye on doddering old Aunt Tilda, who doesn’t know whether she’s chugging burning coffee or a cool glass of water. She’s never fed someone too weak to feed herself. She’s never lived in a house where multiple generations coexist, depending on each other, helping each other, getting to know the differences between children, teenagers, middle-aged parents and old, failing grandparents. She’s never learned from the wisdom and failings of each generation as the events of the day are discussed around the dinner table each evening.
She hasn’t had these experiences because poor, idiotic little Virginia is a child. And you haven’t had them for exactly the same reason. Yes, you have been infantilized by our mobile, break-up-the-family oriented society. You have been dumbed down by our warehousing health care system – our nursing home-hospital-industrial complex. You brain has been reduced to mush by third party interference in the life cycle of the species Homo Sapien. And you’ve been educated by an equally infantile generation of government bureaucrats masquerading as teachers.
Back when I was a kid, families were just getting out of the habit of living together. It was not unusual for three and four generations of a family to live under the same roof. In those days, a vacation was a few hours being anywhere except home. Being at home could drive you crazy at times. And it could do something else – force you to grow up and face reality. Chiefly, the reality that people wither and die.
Here in America, people don’t really die anymore. Even with the advent of hospice care, a small step in the right direction, those who don’t simply drop dead all at once just fade away. At a distance. Out of our sight and out of our care. They are whisked away to a shiny palace called a hospital, where teams of highly trained professionals wipe their dying behinds and feed them when they’re too weak to feed themselves. A housekeeping staff cleans their room so it’s all florescenty antiseptic. Then they let you come in and visit. But not for too long. A few hours is enough to show your concern.
Then when grandma stops breathing in the middle of the night, the third shift of highly trained professionals will put her on a ventilator and give her fancy antibiotics, so she’ll still be in her spotless room when you visit the next day. She won’t know you’re there, but at least you’ll feel better because you took time (but not a lot of time) out of your busy schedule to visit.
After a week of this, your non-functioning grandma dies. You don’t have to show up. The hospital calls the funeral home for you. It’s all taken care of. It’s been so hard on you. Oh how you have suffered for your beloved grandma.
You didn’t change a sheet, wipe a behind or spoon one drop of Jello into grandma’s mouth. All you did when they called a week ago was say “Do everything.” Those magic words. Do Everything. Roll them around on your tongue. These words assuaged any guilt you may have had about grandma. Maybe you didn’t call or visit often enough. But now, at no cost to you, these magic words have made you a better person.
Our country has sanitized death. Removed it from our lives, or at least the part of our lives we actively participate in. And the magical phrase “Do everything” makes it possible to be a better person at everyone else’s expense. We have farmed out our family relationships. Replaced them with television, the internet and experts who always know better than us what to do with our dying relatives.
Whatever government decides to do about health care, the one thing it won’t do is have the needed discussion about how we die in this country. Because that discussion should never have been with the government in the first place. The political class want to avoid the topic just like poor little dimwitted Virginia. They want to keep us in our infantile state. It makes us more pliable to their foolishness.
We need to have this discussion among ourselves. We need to readjust our expectations. Take care of our own for a change. We must reintegrate death into our psyches because it surely comes to us all. We need to make it acceptable to die without a gaggle of tubes and high tech wizardry plaguing our last moments. And any health care plan that plays make believe with death and dying will fail and should fail.
Poor little imbecilic Virginia has an excuse for all of this. She is but a child. What’s your excuse? Yes, they are going to pull grandma’s plug. And they SHOULD pull grandma’s plug. In fact, most of the time, grandma should never have been plugged in at all. Until next time.
Addendum: In case you don’t know, Virginia O’Hanlon was the little girl who in 1897 wrote a letter asking the editor of the New York Sun if Santa Claus existed. Sun editor Francis Church famously answered that “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” Yes, he lied. And to put an even finer point on the story and this blog post, Virginia O’Hanlon died in 1971 . . . . in a nursing home.
