Read Online Holding Silvan by Monica Wesolowska - Free Book Online

She takes her duty to do good very seriously but she does not take herself too seriously. David thinks this means she
will eventually laugh at her own “neurosis” about Silvan’s soul, but I don’t. I know that if she can’t save Silvan’s life with prayer, she will at least want to save his soul.

Confirmation
    THAT AFTERNOON, I CALL FATHER B FROM HOME WHILE David stays at the hospital with Silvan. What we are doing for Silvan feels compassionate, what we are doing is not euthanasia, but I wonder if my mother feels the distinction. This is important because I know the Catholic Church agrees with the government: it is against euthanasia. I know this with all the visceral weight of discovering it on my own, one foggy afternoon in San Francisco when I was in high school. For some reason, I had chosen euthanasia as my topic for a school report. Because of Karen Ann Quinlan and those dinner table conversations, I knew there was controversy about what Quinlan’s parents had done. I thought what they had done was euthanasia. I assumed this meant the church was for it and the legal system against it and I was feeling righteous about the church’s loving stance. Certain of my case, I set out after school for the Catholic bookstore to research my topic. A middle-aged woman in a gray cardigan helped me to a slim pamphlet, and back out on the street, I caught my bus where the only thing I gleaned from the dense pages was the Church’s condemnation of what I’d thought they would champion. I sat there in my itchy, wool school uniform in shock. The church was against what I thought of as linked with only positives: compassion, acceptance of the inevitability of death. In my dictionary, the first definition seemed to agree. “An easy death,” the dictionary said, as if anyone could argue against that.
    I soon had a chance to argue the issue beyond the abstract,
to experience its true complexity. A girl in the youth group I attended Sunday nights at my church had an accident and fell into an irreversible coma and her parents chose to remove her from life support. At the end of the week, the breathing tube would be removed. The novitiates who ran the youth group presented this as a reasonable and loving option, a Catholic option, and this confused me. Hadn’t I just done a school report in which I had to say that the church was against euthanasia? I still hadn’t understood the distinction between euthanasia and allowing someone to die. Even more confusing was the fact that until this day, I’d never liked this girl. Kirsten had swishy blond hair, giggled constantly, and attracted every boy in the room while never once looking at me. But hearing she might die, I wondered if God were testing me. Perhaps Quinlan’s parents had been wrong after all, perhaps Kirsten’s parents were wrong. Perhaps the church was wrong. Perhaps they had all lost faith in the miracles of saints.
    The week Kirsten was in her coma I struggled towards the peak of my religious faith. I wondered if this was God calling me at last. Each night in bed, I ran through my fantasy: running past hospital security, reaching Kirsten’s bed, putting my healing hands on her. But always I felt the same discomfort when she opened her eyes. If I didn’t even like her, how could I hope to heal her better than the parents who loved her? At last the day came, life support was removed, Kirsten died. That night, we gathered in youth group with unusual solemnity. Kirsten’s peals of laughter were absent. We gathered in a great circle with the lights off and passed a candle from hand to hand. In that golden silence, we could hear each other breathing and I understood. The call I’d felt was not the call of God after all. It had been the call of guilt, the call of vanity, whereas here in this room was real love. Kirsten’s parents had made this choice because they loved her. And as I had this humble