Everyone Is Eventually a Burden
As laws permitting medically assisted death advance, how will we learn to accept diminishment rather than kill ourselves?
I got to know the theologian Robert W. Jenson during the final years of his life. Like many people, I first met him on the page, starting with his Systematic Theology. But I soon discovered that he and I worshiped at the same church and, not only that, we liked to sit in the same south transept. One Sunday, I leaned over the pew in front of me to where he was seated in a wheelchair and asked, “Are you Robert Jenson?” He looked at me perplexedly and, after a long pause, finally said, “Well, that’s my name.” Soon thereafter, I was invited to call him “Jens,” and before long I was visiting him at his home about twice each week. As our friendship grew, I would sometimes keep him company while his wife, Blanche, left the house so that he wouldn’t be alone. By this time, he was unable to get himself a drink or something to eat or walk unassisted to the bathroom.
On one occasion, after assisting him to and from the bathroom, Jens frustratedly muttered something about being a burden. I insisted, “You’re not a burden.” At this, he looked at me and said very clearly, “Yes, I am. Everyone is eventually a burden.”
His surprise at my pastorally inept response, and my surprise at his candor, centered around the same problem: my politeness.
In many expressions of politeness in our culture, it is expected that we will be somewhat dishonest, and in some instances, we consider truthfulness impolite. When a friend has inconvenienced us, it is expected that we insist, “It’s no problem!” When someone takes us to a business lunch, even though it is customary for the one who did the inviting to pay, the invited is still expected to offer – knowing full well the offer is only a gesture.
The gentle untruths of polite behavior serve as a social lubricant, protecting our relationships from wear and tear. Politeness buffers us from the friction of day-to-day life with other people. And that buffering is precisely why effective pastoral care often requires impoliteness: the pastoral caregiver must deal with real life, in complete truthfulness, with precise attention to those aspects of life where there is resistance, which is to say, where there is friction. That is the only way to touch the soul. The polite easing of friction is antithetical to pastoral work.
My failure with Jens – with whom, it should be acknowledged, I was not officially in a pastoral relationship – was that he exposed his soul in a sense, and by my politeness I declined his implicit request for care.
I share this experience with Jens because I have been mulling over a parenting challenge, and I think the way I let Jens down that day points to a solution. As I have seen the slow advance of laws permitting medically assisted death, I have begun wondering how I can raise my children to grow into the sorts of people who would rather choose to endure the painful, humiliating loss of health and bodily function than to die by suicide. I believe that part of the answer to this parenting challenge is found by examining the problem of polite dishonesty when it comes to the ways we burden and are burdened by one another. These two experiences – being a burden and being burdened – are not the same, but for any who will resist the seduction of suicide as an escape from the reality that human life is burdensome, being a burden and bearing burdens must be taught and practiced. And I believe the first step is overcoming the polite dishonesty that denies people are burdens at all.
The question that generally goes unasked and therefore unanswered is: what happens to people who are a burden once they have been totally buffered from the acknowledgment of this fact?
I’m a GenXer. Many of us grew up with the idea we’d support older family members, even if we weren’t excited about the prospect. Millennials have much less and GenZ seems to completely lack that idea. I may not be a burden in old age, as “burden” requires the one who needs and one who gives.
I love what you wrote but my fear is that when caring for someone who is very ill, you need a team of people and we are so scattered and isolated. Years ago, I visited a relative in a nursing home that was in a mountain top village in Southern Italy where my father was born. The residents were lovingly cared for by nuns who lived with them 365 days/year. The nuns were devoted to the elderly and those being cared for knew they were cherished and could count on seeing the same faces each day.