Say A Prayer For Someone Else

Lately, I have been in a massive blue funk over something I cannot control in my life. Sometimes I feel like I am falling down a hole that has no beginning and no end. My mentor tells me to stop whining like a teenager, and to a point he’s right. I am trying to control other people and their reactions to me, which is, of course, impossible. Being alive is really far more important. I have proof of this in my own life, this day.

A couple of months back I wrote about my friend of many years, Gloria. Not long afterwards she came to work where I am now, and for the first time in many months, I saw her.
My shock may have played over my face, though I tried to hide it. I knew what I was looking at immediately: a dying person. Though Gloria is less than five feet tall, she was always a perky person, fairly good health, usually a love of life in her, despite all the crap she has gone through. What I saw that first day was a bloating, yet emaciated body, an image which rivals anything ever shown from countries full of starving children. It was the pure image of a body failing. Along the line I had learned of all the complications Hep B had brought to her, but she played down their severity, or was simply not being given a clear picture of her condition. I came to believe that the doctors were dancing around telling her the truth.

A month ago, her pain and bloating got bad enough that she went to the hospital, where more than 2 gallons of fluid was drained out of her liver. My nurse friend Beverly tells me one can lose up to 70% of the functioning liver and survive, but excess fluid like this was indicative that it was dying. I knew without being told, I had known something along these lines. I had gone through slow liver deterioration with one of my cats. It is an ugly, painful, slow death for any living creature. I finally put my sweet kitten down myself, by injection, when she was so close to death, she probably didn’t know me anymore. I wish this world would let us be equally merciful to our own kind; I do not see it as a religious issue, but a moral one. Pain that cannot be aided to healing should be allowed the mercy of choosing to end. We cling to those who are leaving us out of some sort of selfish vanity. We don’t want to be left alone, even if it means watching loved ones suffer.

Only recently the doctors have tried to get Gloria to understand her likelihood of survival is not good. Even if she gets a new liver soon enough (not easy in this world,) the odds will be against her even then. I have to wonder if there is a point when they take you back off the waiting list, when there is no longer a reason to try to save a person. It cannot be an easy decision to make.

I see her at work, deligent despite severe exhaustion and weakness, and I wonder how I myself would face my mortality. It is sitting beside each of us from the moment of conception, yet we do not think about it until someone around us becomes ill. It is situations like hers that should make each of us happy that we have another healthy day to be in. Yet we moan about the dumbest, most uncontrollable parts of living, rather than reveling in the happy simple things around us.

Gloria now seems to know she will not live to see 2006, at least if things continue as they are. I am a firm believer in miracles; I pray for her now, instead of fretting my overly abundant world lacking a thing or two. I will live another year, accidents barred, and I will have other chances like the one that has been gnawing at me for two weeks. I will look to her fading life the next time I am tempted to indulge in self-pity and moping. There are more important things to occupy my time.

Please say a prayer for Gloria, that whatever form of God your worship will show her mercy, and let this path she’s on resolve itself swiftly whichever way it must go. Then go spend time with the people or things or places most important to you. They just might not be there tomorrow.