Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501160021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But, as is always true of the cycles of life, beginnings follow endings. For me, this season I've been unable to avoid dwelling on conclusions, on death.
In the week after Christmas, my wife and I joined her sister Carol Oxentine in caring for Carol's husband, Mike.
Some of you may remember Mike as the friend who helped guide me through the rebuilding of my van's engine and the spiritual recharging of my batteries a year and a half ago. And you may remember that Mike was struck by lung cancer last summer.
We'd known for weeks that Mike wasn't going to win this battle, but that didn't make the early morning hours of Dec. 30 any easier to take.
Mike had been a little restless the night before. When he awoke about 4 a.m. he was tired, not rested. Weary of struggling for one more breath, even with the aid of the oxygen mask, he asked to be allowed to drink down an overdose of the morphine he was taking for pain.
He was ready to die, though he was only 47 years old. He'd seen both his children married, celebrated the first Christmas with his first grandchild. Everything he could take care of for his wife, he'd taken care of.
Two hours later, Mike was relaxed, calm, peaceful, though he'd had only his regular dose of morphine. His breathing became irregular. Carol and his children told him in words that could never convey the emotion they really felt that they loved him.
In a sublimely beautiful but crushingly tragic act of selfless love, they told him it was OK to go - even when they didn't believe it was OK.
So we cried and he left us, peaceful at the end as he had not been for days.
Caught up in rituals of grief and mourning, we missed the news later that day that someone had charged into two Massachusetts abortion clinics and murdered an employee at each place.
Although I heard the news late, my reaction was like that of countless others who follow the abortion issue - horror that two innocent women were dead and a sick feeling that the senseless acts of a maniac could derail whatever fragile progress has been made in the debate.
I thought of the contrast between the deaths of those two women in Massachusetts and my friend Mike. Where Mike had peace with his family at the end, they had horror and violence at the hands of a stranger.
A few - and I truly believe it is really a few - abortion opponents make shabby attempts to justify the murders by saying those deaths may prevent hundreds of abortions. Every thinking person knows that rationale is false and hollow. Only fools buy it.
The danger is that a few more rabid idiots will latch onto murder as a way to end abortion, and that more abortion-rights supporters will conclude that most abortion opponents are wild-eyed zealots capable of murder.
Maybe we'll be surprised and discover that this violence leads to greater resolve to prevent its recurrence.
Lastly, I learned of the Dec. 23 death of another person with whom I've had a lot of contact in recent years - if only through his writing.
As I've covered the issue homosexuality and religion for the past five years or so, perhaps no name has been cited so often as John Boswell's by those who would open the church doors to gays and lesbians.
Boswell's 1980 book, "Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality," focused the arguments that the Bible and Christian tradition were not so solidly anti-homosexual as had been generally accepted.
Though the book failed at Boswell's goal of being the final rebuttal of the argument that the Bible consistently and absolutely condemns homosexual behavior, it did raise significant, legitimate questions about the traditional view of the Bible and homosexuality. For instance, does the Bible address the issue of a committed, monogamous homosexual relationship?
Boswell's failing as a scholar - he was a former chairman of the history department at Yale University - lay in his commitment to proving a pre-concluded point rather than delineating all the truth he could discover. Nevertheless, and despite much legitimate criticism of his methodology, his was an influential voice in the debate, and his work was quoted by nearly every study group and manual on the subject issued by the so-called mainline Protestant denominations in recent years.
Boswell died of complications from AIDS. He was 47.
Because Boswell died of a disease associated with particular risky behaviors his death will be dismissed with a wink by some, with a shrug by others who might even say he got what he deserved.
I wonder if they would say the same thing about my friend Mike, who also died at 47. He was not a homosexual, nor an intravenous drug user and didn't have AIDS. He was a three-pack-a-day smoker who died of lung cancer.
I wonder if they would say the same thing about women who worked in a clinic that provided abortions.
These endings are a reminder to treasure the gift of life in this new year - and that the value of a life usually has little or nothing to do with the cause of death.
by CNB