My family calls from home: Aunt Mariangela phoned—can you call her back tonight at half past six? I'm at work, another long day, a difficult conversation with a daughter about what's best for her father after a devastating stroke. What does Mariangela want? What can I do, six hundred kilometers away? Just yesterday I read Ombre e Luci and Mariani's article troubled me and set me thinking, and Mariangela has a sixth sense—that's probably why she calls.
Maybe she thought of me because I'm a neurologist specializing in degenerative diseases, or because I'm a mother with a small personal story of life choices, or perhaps because I've been a friend of Faith and Light forever.
She knows this subject matters to me and that I'm always eager to understand and help others see that there is no single answer, that in the real world there are many facets, every person is different, with their own history and past, the loves that surround them, the reasons behind their fears.
Dinner with two psychologists and a neurologist: "But doctors, can you decide whether to put someone on a respirator?" My colleague answers: "We can put one on, but we cannot take one off."
We need laws that tell us what we "can" and "cannot" do, but I don't think they should force us to act against a person's wishes in order to save their life.
They ask which side you're on. I may be a coward, but I cannot answer these questions with certainty: Is this life? Is it right to continue treatment when there's no hope of recovery? Is therapeutic abortion justified? Is it right that life brings us to these choices?
Every choice, large or small, weighty or trivial, can be criticized and questioned, but if it's made together, after discernment and reflection, conscious that the ultimate goal is the fullness of human life, then perhaps we risk fewer mistakes.
I wonder why hospice exists for terminal cancer patients but not for those with neurological diseases. Where is the line? Who draws it? Perhaps we need laws that help people make choices with greater awareness and shared responsibility. But we also need education in awareness itself: humanity was not born to suffer, yet—alas—we do suffer, and it falls to us to find every way to be happy and to rejoice.
Two Beautiful Things
We managed to organize an art therapy program for our Alzheimer's patients. Every Thursday, Eleonora guides them to express themselves through serious, elaborate visual art, aiming to help them recover the sense and hidden depth that these people seem to have lost.
I watched again in Loreto a film of Jean Vanier at Lourdes in '71. His smile beside young people being carried down the airplane stairs on stretchers or in wheelchairs. That smile—the joy pursued at any cost—is what made the pilgrimage possible and gave birth to Faith and Light. A full joy, shared, scandalous, misunderstood. This is what we must teach our children.
Francesca De Rino, 2011