My daughter is dying!

Just two years ago my daughter Esperanza was finally dying, after living on the brink of death for a long time. Born blind and deaf, with multiple malformations, she was a living miracle, until her body gave out. On April 20th she suffered respiratory arrest and was kept alive on machines for 20 hours, before her heart stopped.

We had called her “the come back kid”, because she had quit breathing hundreds of times before. Her brain was too small to support her body’s growth, so when she seizured her heart and lungs shut down. Everyone in the family had to resuscitate her numerous times with intravenous Valium and CPR, although as her mother and doctor I bore the brunt of the burden. How many times had we waited in anguish to see if she would regain her tenacious hold on life?

But now she hadn’t snapped back, her brain was dead and only the machines kept her alive. I was in a strange city, hours from the family and days away from the doctors who knew her case and could help us. We were surrounded by strangers who cared little for me and my dying child, who saw her only as a malnourished Indian girl who had outlived her time and usefulness.

All through the night I watched over her and saw her body systems fail, the heart no longer pumping, the kidneys failing, fluid clouding the lungs. After struggling for 3700 days to keep her alive and happy, we had lost the fight, she was dying. I couldn’t contain my anguish and despair, going to the empty parking lot to scream out, “God, she’s dying, Panchis is dying! God, I can’t stand watching her die!”

Then I would go back to the cubicle in the emergency room to keep vigil over her body, so thin and frail, punctured and pierced with tubes and sensors. I couldn’t even hold her, or shield her from the useless probing and poking that would not bring her brain back to life. The medical personnel gave her abbreviated history as they handed her off to the next shift, solemn in the face of my overwhelming grief, but laughing and joking around the next corner. I wanted to scream, to shake them and cry out, “Don’t you see that my daughter is dying? Don’t you care, don’t you see my anguish? Don’t you sense the enormity of her spirit leaving her body, the rending of the bonds that kept her body breathing and feeling and growing and loving? How can you laugh, how can you go on as if nothing is happening?”

But no, polite society doesn’t permit an outpouring of grief. Those whose daughters and sisters and mothers and fathers are not dying don’t want to be reminded of the raw, desperate, irreversible pain of death. And so she died.

Two years later, I remember those hours, reliving the pain and anguish, weeping softly now instead of crying out in my anger and despair. And when I speak to God, he answers, “Yes, child, I know how you felt, it happened to me also.”

“You, my Lord? You know how I felt?”

“Yes, child, I watched my son die for hours, his body pierced and torn. He too was far from home and surrounded by strangers, his mother watching but unable to ease his pain. I too wanted to scream and shake everyone and tell them, ‘my son is dying, how can you be indifferent to his pain?' And I did, I shook the whole earth, I blocked the warmth of the sun’s rays, all of creation was in darkness and shaking for hours. Every tremor of my dying son reverberated to the pillars of the earth, the chill and darkness that came over the earth was a pale reflection of the coldness of death that crept over his tortured form. Every human alive on the earth felt the chill of death that day, the earth melting under their feet, and saw me abandoning my son who was bearing their shame and guilt. You have no idea of the terror people sensed as they whispered to each other “surely this was the son of God . . . we have killed the holy one . . . what have we done? What is going to happen to us now?”

You and I, gentle reader, are part of that crowd who mocked and watched the dying son suffer because of our actions. When we sense the anger and anguish and rage of a holy Father we know he will turn his back on us and abandon us to the darkness and vileness that is within us. Our only hope is to confess what have we done, and like the guilty companion, beg to be remembered on the third day when the darkness and cold and guilt melt away in glorious new life.