Michael Ledeen wrote an article, Is Obama Naive?, that appeared on the National Review's web site on 09/24/2009, in which he claims that President Obama likes tyrants and dislikes America:
Is Obama Naive?
"I don't think so. I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America. I think he'd like to be more powerful, I think he is trying to get control over as much of our lives as he can, so that he can put an end to the annoying tumult of our public life. As when he said (about health care) to the Congress, "Okay, you've talked enough, now it's time to do the right thing (my thing)." And he's trying to end American power in the outside world. He's saying "I'm going to stop us, before we kill again."
There is nothing unusual about elitist hatred of freedom. Back in the 18th century, when book publishing really got going, British authors were infuriated that they had to submit to the judgment of a marketplace. They didn't want to be judged by people who were obviously inferior to them, and there was a great rage among the intelligentsia, including some very famous men. And in modern times, we can all name famous intellectuals who fawned all over Mussolini, Stalin, Fidel, and even Hitler.
American politics are very fractious, and always have been. Leaders are constantly frustrated, and some of them come to yearn for an end to our freedom. They think they know best, they just want to tell us what to do and have us shut up and do it. I think Obama is one of them. He's not naïve. It's different. He doesn't like the way things work here, he thinks he can do much better, and he's possessed of the belief that America has done a lot of terrible things in the world, and should be prevented from doing such things ever again. The two convictions mesh perfectly. It's The Best and the Brightest run amok.
Democratic leaders' envy of tyrants' power can be understood. But it can't be forgiven."
Let's examine this article and see how it fails to support its own assertions.
Ledeen says, "I think that (Obama) rather likes tyrants and dislikes America. I think he'd like to be more powerful, I think he is trying to get control over as much of our lives as he can, so that he can put an end to the annoying tumult of our public life."
How does he back up these bold statements? By allegedly quoting one sentence from a speech by President Obama concerning health care: "Okay, you've talked enough, now it's time to do the right thing (my thing)." Weak. Also, possibly not even an accurate quote. I tried searching the internet using that quote, minus the "my thing," and the only results were references back to Ledeen's article, not to any quote by President Obama. Ledeen even had to editorialize in that sentence by assuming that Obama only wanted Congress to act on the health care matter to support his "thing." How is this proof that Obama likes tyrants and dislikes America? Your guess is as good as mine.
Ledeen then goes on to say, "And he's trying to end American power in the outside world. He's saying "I'm going to stop us, before we kill again." Where is Ledeen's evidence? Nowhere to be found in this article.
"There is nothing unusual about elitist hatred of freedom. Back in the 18th century, when book publishing really got going, British authors were infuriated that they had to submit to the judgment of a marketplace. They didn't want to be judged by people who were obviously inferior to them, and there was a great rage among the intelligentsia, including some very famous men." Ledeen could have named some. After all, there were many British authors in the 18th century. Surely he could have provided some quotes. Wonder why he didn't?
Same criticism applies to Ledeen's next statement: "And in modern times, we can all name famous intellectuals who fawned all over Mussolini, Stalin, Fidel, and even Hitler." Is that right? I challenge any reader, off the top of your head, to name these "famous intellectuals." Good luck. Obviously, Ledeen didn't choose to name any. Picture him being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly. "So, Mr. Ledeen, as I cannot come up with those "famous intellectuals," please name them for me." I can hear Ledeen's stammering now. One thing for which I admire O'Reilly, besides his penchant for increasing our vocabulary at the end of each show, is that he doesn't let politicians and newsmakers wiggle off his interviewing hook. He reels them in. Bill would have a ball with Ledeen.
"American politics are very fractious, and always have been. Leaders are constantly frustrated, and some of them come to yearn for an end to our freedom. They think they know best, they just want to tell us what to do and have us shut up and do it. I think Obama is one of them." I agree with the first sentence. The next three just constitute more unsubstantiated hyperbole. Evidence please.
"He doesn't like the way things work here, he thinks he can do much better, and he's possessed of the belief that America has done a lot of terrible things in the world, and should be prevented from doing such things ever again. The two convictions mesh perfectly. It's The Best and the Brightest run amok." I imagine that most politicians, regardless of party, don't like the way things work, and think they can do much better. But then Ledeen continues with yet another unsupported statement, "... (Obama's) possessed of the belief that America has done a lot of terrible things in the world, and should be prevented from doing such things ever again." Yawn.
Drum roll, please. Ledeen concludes, not surprisingly, with, "Democratic leaders' envy of tyrants' power can be understood. But it can't be forgiven." He made clear his opinion that President Obama falls into that category. So who are the others? Names and quotes to substantiate that claim, Mr. Ledeen. Oh...I see...that would have required research and an intellectual discipline that you do not seemingly possess. Your comments, therefore, can be understood. But they can't be forgiven.
But wait. I must commend you on one success. Your article's title is, "Is Obama Naive?" You first sentence stated, "I don't think so." Yet near the end of your article, you wrote, "He's not naïve." This is a 313 word essay. Yet in that short time, you at least succeeded in changing the mind of one person, yourself, on the issue of whether Obama is naive or not. Congratulations.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Recession Hits U.S. Workers 54 and Under Hardest
Dennis Cauchon of USA TODAY reported that the current recession has affected U.S. workers who are less than 54 years old, particularly males, harder than any other segment of the population. Why? The article states:
"The incomes of the young and middle-aged — especially men — have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s, a USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found.
People 54 or younger are losing ground financially at an unprecedented rate in this recession, widening a gap between young and old that had been expanding for years.
While the young have lost ground, older people have grown more prosperous over the years and the decades. Older women have done best of all.
The dividing line between those getting richer or poorer: the year 1955. If you were born before that, you're part of a generation enjoying a four-decade run of historic income growth. Every generation after that is now sinking economically.
Household income for people in their peak earning years — between ages 45 and 54 — plunged $7,700 to $64,349 from 2000 through 2008, after adjusting for inflation. People in their 20s and 30s suffered similar drops. Older people enjoyed all the gains.
The line between the haves and have-nots runs through the middle of the Baby Boom, the population explosion 1946-64.
"The second half of the Baby Boom may be in the worst shape of all," says demographer Cheryl Russell of New Strategist Publications, a research firm. "They're loaded with expenses for housing, cars and kids, but they will never generate the income that their parents enjoyed."
What caused the income gap:
- Waiting line for good jobs. Older people are working longer, crowding out young people from the best-paying jobs while boosting the incomes of older workers and seniors.
- Global competition. Low-income workers in other nations have pushed down wages in the USA. Newly hired workers — generally younger people — experience the wage decline first, says economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning think tank.
- Golden age of retirement. Social Security and private pensions have elevated the incomes of retired people to record levels and reduced poverty among the elderly.
One bright sign: Women have boosted income by holding half the USA's jobs, working longer hours and narrowing the gender pay gap from 2000, when women made 25% less than men, to 2008, when they made 23% less. Older, college-educated career women have had the biggest gains.
Terry Neese, founder of a human resources firm in Oklahoma City, says income shifts partly reflect changing gender roles and values.
As women bring in more income, men can work less or stay home with children, she says. Neese says her own daughter, who now runs the family firm, worked less and went to more kids' soccer games. "My daughter says, 'I'm not going to work like you worked,' " says Neese, 60."
An important part of the American Dream has always been that the next generation will be better off financially than the current one. That has always been the case. Will the current recession be only a temporary setback in the continuation of that trend?
It has been argued that since the U.S. recovered from the Great Depression, then it can certainly recover from this crisis. However, the U.S. had both WWII and the rebuilding that followed to help pull it out of the depression. Also, there was no low wage world wide competition with which to deal in 1945.
Will the U.S. (and world) economy return to, and ultimately exceed, the pre-recession levels? Or will we live with lowered expectations for the foreseeable future?
The 'under age 54s' that I know personally are damned hard workers. They and their families deserve the bright futures that preceding generations have virtually taken for granted. I know that they will work extra hard to succeed in spite of the extra obstacles in their pathes, yet it still angers me when bad things happen to good people.
"The incomes of the young and middle-aged — especially men — have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s, a USA TODAY analysis of new Census data found.
People 54 or younger are losing ground financially at an unprecedented rate in this recession, widening a gap between young and old that had been expanding for years.
While the young have lost ground, older people have grown more prosperous over the years and the decades. Older women have done best of all.
The dividing line between those getting richer or poorer: the year 1955. If you were born before that, you're part of a generation enjoying a four-decade run of historic income growth. Every generation after that is now sinking economically.
Household income for people in their peak earning years — between ages 45 and 54 — plunged $7,700 to $64,349 from 2000 through 2008, after adjusting for inflation. People in their 20s and 30s suffered similar drops. Older people enjoyed all the gains.
The line between the haves and have-nots runs through the middle of the Baby Boom, the population explosion 1946-64.
"The second half of the Baby Boom may be in the worst shape of all," says demographer Cheryl Russell of New Strategist Publications, a research firm. "They're loaded with expenses for housing, cars and kids, but they will never generate the income that their parents enjoyed."
What caused the income gap:
- Waiting line for good jobs. Older people are working longer, crowding out young people from the best-paying jobs while boosting the incomes of older workers and seniors.
- Global competition. Low-income workers in other nations have pushed down wages in the USA. Newly hired workers — generally younger people — experience the wage decline first, says economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning think tank.
- Golden age of retirement. Social Security and private pensions have elevated the incomes of retired people to record levels and reduced poverty among the elderly.
One bright sign: Women have boosted income by holding half the USA's jobs, working longer hours and narrowing the gender pay gap from 2000, when women made 25% less than men, to 2008, when they made 23% less. Older, college-educated career women have had the biggest gains.
Terry Neese, founder of a human resources firm in Oklahoma City, says income shifts partly reflect changing gender roles and values.
As women bring in more income, men can work less or stay home with children, she says. Neese says her own daughter, who now runs the family firm, worked less and went to more kids' soccer games. "My daughter says, 'I'm not going to work like you worked,' " says Neese, 60."
An important part of the American Dream has always been that the next generation will be better off financially than the current one. That has always been the case. Will the current recession be only a temporary setback in the continuation of that trend?
It has been argued that since the U.S. recovered from the Great Depression, then it can certainly recover from this crisis. However, the U.S. had both WWII and the rebuilding that followed to help pull it out of the depression. Also, there was no low wage world wide competition with which to deal in 1945.
Will the U.S. (and world) economy return to, and ultimately exceed, the pre-recession levels? Or will we live with lowered expectations for the foreseeable future?
The 'under age 54s' that I know personally are damned hard workers. They and their families deserve the bright futures that preceding generations have virtually taken for granted. I know that they will work extra hard to succeed in spite of the extra obstacles in their pathes, yet it still angers me when bad things happen to good people.
Friday, September 11, 2009
9/11 - A Time to Remember and Reflect
Let's spend our time this week remembering and reflecting, rather than bitterly analyzing and debating. See you next Friday.
Friday, September 4, 2009
End of Life Counseling: Death With Dignity
As we approach our life's end, counseling can ease that final step. Ever since certain politicians began frothing at the mouth about 'death panels', and how they will be pulling the plug on grandma, I had seen no information about the established procedure of end-of-life counseling. Until now.
The July 8, 2009 New York Times published an article entitled, Sisters Face Death With Dignity and Reverence. I quote the article verbatim:
"Gravely ill with heart disease, tethered to an oxygen tank, her feet swollen and her appetite gone, Sister Dorothy Quinn, 87, readied herself to die in the nursing wing of the Sisters of St. Joseph convent where she has been a member since she was a teenager.
She was surrounded by friends and colleagues of nearly seven decades. Some had been with her in college, others fellow teachers in Alabama at the time of the Selma march, more from her years as a home health aide and spiritual counselor to elderly shut-ins.
As she lay dying, Sister Dorothy declined most of her 23 medications not essential for her heart condition, prescribed by specialists but winnowed by a geriatrician who knows that elderly people are often overmedicated. She decided against a mammogram to learn the nature of a lump in her one remaining breast, understanding that she would not survive treatment.
There were goodbyes and decisions about giving away her quilting supplies and the jigsaw puzzle collection that inspired the patterns of her one-of-a-kind pieces. She consoled her biological sister, who pleaded with her to do whatever it took to stay alive.
Even as her prognosis gradually improved from hours to weeks and even months, Sister Dorothy’s goal was not immortality; it was getting back to quilting, as she has. She spread her latest on her bed: Autumnal sunflowers. “I’m not afraid of death,” she said. “Even when I was dying, I wasn’t afraid of it. You just get a feeling within yourself at a certain point. You know when to let it be.”
A convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death — none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
Primary care for most of the ailing sisters is provided by Dr. Robert C. McCann, a geriatrician at the University of Rochester, who says that through a combination of philosophy and happenstance, “they have better deaths than any I’ve ever seen.”
Dr. McCann’s long relationship with the sisters gives him the time and opportunity, impossible in the hurly-burly of an intensive-care unit, to clarify goals of care long before a crisis: Whether feeding tubes or ventilators make sense. If pain control is more important than alertness. That studies show that CPR is rarely effective and often dangerous in the elderly.
“It is much easier to guide people to better choices here than in a hospital,” he said, “and you don’t get a lot of pushback when you suggest that more treatment is not better treatment.”
But that is not to say the sisters are denied aggressive treatment. Sister Mary Jane Mitchell, 65, chose radical surgery and radiation for a grave form of brain cancer. She now lives on the Alzheimer’s unit, unable to speak and squeezing shut her lips when aides try to feed her.
Then there is Sister Marie Albert Alderman, 84 and blind in one eye from a stroke. She sees a kidney specialist, who, she says, “is trying to keep me off the machine by staying on top of things.” By that she means dialysis, which she would not refuse. “If they want to try it, fine,” she said. “But I don’t want it to go on and on and on.”
But Sister Mary Jane and Sister Marie Albert are exceptions here. Few sisters opt for major surgery, high-tech diagnostic tests or life-sustaining machinery. And nobody can remember the last time anyone died in a hospital, which was one of the goals in selling the old Mother House, with its tumbledown infirmary — a “Bells of St. Mary” kind of place — and using the money to finance a new facility appropriate for end-of-life care.
“There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence,” said Sister Mary Lou, 56, a former nurse. “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”
In the old Mother House, the infirmary was a place apart. Here, everyone mixes. Of the 150 residents, nearly half live in the west wing, designated for independent living, in apartments with raised toilets, grab bars and the like. These are the sisters who have given up paying jobs and shared apartments in the community because of encroaching infirmity.
Forty sisters live in assisted-living studios, and another 40 in the nursing home and Alzheimer’s unit, all in the east wing, with the chapel, dining rooms and library at the central intersection. Closed-circuit television allows those confined to their rooms to watch daily religious services.
Remaining money from the sale of the Mother House went into a shared retirement fund covering the women’s lodging and medical care, along with Social Security payments of the retired and salaries of those still working — one is a surgeon, another a chief executive, and several are college professors. Dr. McCann bills Medicare for home visits, although most of the care he delivers is not covered by the government and goes without reimbursement.
Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.
On recent rounds, Dr. McCann saw Sister Beverly Jones, 86, a former music teacher losing her eyesight to macular degeneration. Upbeat, Sister Beverly told the doctor about the latest book she was reading using a magnifying device — “Beethoven’s Hair” by Russell Martin, about the composer’s DNA.
He also saw Sister Jamesine Riley, 75, once the president of the congregation, who barely survived a car accident that left her with a brain injury, dozens of broken bones and pneumonia. “You’re not giving up, are you?” Dr. McCann asked her.
“No, I’m discouraged, but I’m not giving up,” Sister Jamesine replied in a strong voice.
He told her he worried that she now found herself with so little control. She nodded in stoic assent.
Some days, Dr. McCann said, he arrives with his “head spinning,” from hospitals and intensive-care units where death can be tortured, impersonal and wastefully expensive, only to find himself in a “different world where it’s really possible to focus on what’s important for people” and, he adds, “what’s exportable, what we can learn from an ideal environment like this.”
Laura L. Carstensen, the director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University, says the convent setting calms the tendency for public policy discussion about end-of-life treatment “to devolve into a debate about euthanasia or rationing health care based on age.”
“Every time I speak to a group about the need to improve the dying process, somebody raises their hand and says, ‘You’re talking about killing old people,’ ” Dr. Carstensen said. “But nobody would accuse Roman Catholic sisters of that. They could be a beacon in talking about this without it turning into that American black-and-white way of thinking: Either we have to throw everything we’ve got at keeping people alive or leave them on the sidewalk to die.”
Often the Roman Catholic position on end-of-life issues is misconstrued as “do anything and everything necessary” but nothing in Catholic theology demands extraordinary intervention, experts say, nor do the sisters here, or their resident chaplain, Msgr. William H. Shannon, 91, advocate euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.
“Killing somebody who is very, very old, with a pill or something, that isn’t right,” Sister Dorothy said. “But everybody has their own slant on life and death. It’s legitimate to say no to extraordinary means. And dying people, you can tell when they don’t want to eat or drink. That’s a natural thing.”
Barbara Cocilova, the nurse practitioner here, sees differences in the health of these sisters compared with elderly patients in other settings. None have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (perhaps because they do not smoke) and only three have diabetes (often caused by obesity). Among those with Alzheimer’s, Ms. Cocilova said, diagnostic tests tend to produce better-than-expected results among those who are further along in the disease process, a possible result of mental stimulation.
Dr. McCann and others say that the sisters benefit from advanced education, and new ventures in retirement that keep them active. Sister Jamesine was a lawyer who founded a legal clinic for Rochester’s working poor. Sister Mary Jane Mitchell was the first female chaplain in a federal penitentiary.
Sister Bernadine Frieda, 91, spry and sharp, spends her days visiting the infirm with Sister Marie Kellner, 77, both of them onetime science teachers. Sister Marie, who left the classroom because of multiple sclerosis, reminds an astounded sister with Alzheimer’s that she was once a high school principal (“I was?!”) and sings “Peace Is Like a River” to the dying.
“We don’t let anyone go alone on the last journey,” Sister Marie said.
Seven priests moved here in old age, paying their own way, as does Father Shannon, who presides over funerals that are more about the celebratory “alleluia” than the glum “De Profundis.” But he has been with the sisters since he entered the priesthood, first as a professor at Nazareth College, founded by the order, and now as their chaplain. He shares with them the security of knowing he will not die among strangers who have nothing in common but age and infirmity.
“This is what our culture, our society, is starved for, to be rich in relationships,” Sister Mary Lou said. “This is what everyone should have.”
This article did an excellent job of providing real world information on a very sensitive subject. Much needed light was shed. Often, people don't want to face the reality of their demise. Yet we should not be in denial, no matter how painful that realization is.
When my time comes, I hope that I, as well as my wife, will have the support and advice of such counselors. Change is not easy. This ultimate transition is no exception.
The July 8, 2009 New York Times published an article entitled, Sisters Face Death With Dignity and Reverence. I quote the article verbatim:
"Gravely ill with heart disease, tethered to an oxygen tank, her feet swollen and her appetite gone, Sister Dorothy Quinn, 87, readied herself to die in the nursing wing of the Sisters of St. Joseph convent where she has been a member since she was a teenager.
She was surrounded by friends and colleagues of nearly seven decades. Some had been with her in college, others fellow teachers in Alabama at the time of the Selma march, more from her years as a home health aide and spiritual counselor to elderly shut-ins.
As she lay dying, Sister Dorothy declined most of her 23 medications not essential for her heart condition, prescribed by specialists but winnowed by a geriatrician who knows that elderly people are often overmedicated. She decided against a mammogram to learn the nature of a lump in her one remaining breast, understanding that she would not survive treatment.
There were goodbyes and decisions about giving away her quilting supplies and the jigsaw puzzle collection that inspired the patterns of her one-of-a-kind pieces. She consoled her biological sister, who pleaded with her to do whatever it took to stay alive.
Even as her prognosis gradually improved from hours to weeks and even months, Sister Dorothy’s goal was not immortality; it was getting back to quilting, as she has. She spread her latest on her bed: Autumnal sunflowers. “I’m not afraid of death,” she said. “Even when I was dying, I wasn’t afraid of it. You just get a feeling within yourself at a certain point. You know when to let it be.”
A convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death — none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
Primary care for most of the ailing sisters is provided by Dr. Robert C. McCann, a geriatrician at the University of Rochester, who says that through a combination of philosophy and happenstance, “they have better deaths than any I’ve ever seen.”
Dr. McCann’s long relationship with the sisters gives him the time and opportunity, impossible in the hurly-burly of an intensive-care unit, to clarify goals of care long before a crisis: Whether feeding tubes or ventilators make sense. If pain control is more important than alertness. That studies show that CPR is rarely effective and often dangerous in the elderly.
“It is much easier to guide people to better choices here than in a hospital,” he said, “and you don’t get a lot of pushback when you suggest that more treatment is not better treatment.”
But that is not to say the sisters are denied aggressive treatment. Sister Mary Jane Mitchell, 65, chose radical surgery and radiation for a grave form of brain cancer. She now lives on the Alzheimer’s unit, unable to speak and squeezing shut her lips when aides try to feed her.
Then there is Sister Marie Albert Alderman, 84 and blind in one eye from a stroke. She sees a kidney specialist, who, she says, “is trying to keep me off the machine by staying on top of things.” By that she means dialysis, which she would not refuse. “If they want to try it, fine,” she said. “But I don’t want it to go on and on and on.”
But Sister Mary Jane and Sister Marie Albert are exceptions here. Few sisters opt for major surgery, high-tech diagnostic tests or life-sustaining machinery. And nobody can remember the last time anyone died in a hospital, which was one of the goals in selling the old Mother House, with its tumbledown infirmary — a “Bells of St. Mary” kind of place — and using the money to finance a new facility appropriate for end-of-life care.
“There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence,” said Sister Mary Lou, 56, a former nurse. “Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”
In the old Mother House, the infirmary was a place apart. Here, everyone mixes. Of the 150 residents, nearly half live in the west wing, designated for independent living, in apartments with raised toilets, grab bars and the like. These are the sisters who have given up paying jobs and shared apartments in the community because of encroaching infirmity.
Forty sisters live in assisted-living studios, and another 40 in the nursing home and Alzheimer’s unit, all in the east wing, with the chapel, dining rooms and library at the central intersection. Closed-circuit television allows those confined to their rooms to watch daily religious services.
Remaining money from the sale of the Mother House went into a shared retirement fund covering the women’s lodging and medical care, along with Social Security payments of the retired and salaries of those still working — one is a surgeon, another a chief executive, and several are college professors. Dr. McCann bills Medicare for home visits, although most of the care he delivers is not covered by the government and goes without reimbursement.
Dr. McCann said that the sisters’ religious faith insulated them from existential suffering — the “Why me?” refrain commonly heard among those without a belief in an afterlife. Absent that anxiety and fear, Dr. McCann said, there is less pain, less depression, and thus the sisters require only one-third the amount of narcotics he uses to manage end-of-life symptoms among hospitalized patients.
On recent rounds, Dr. McCann saw Sister Beverly Jones, 86, a former music teacher losing her eyesight to macular degeneration. Upbeat, Sister Beverly told the doctor about the latest book she was reading using a magnifying device — “Beethoven’s Hair” by Russell Martin, about the composer’s DNA.
He also saw Sister Jamesine Riley, 75, once the president of the congregation, who barely survived a car accident that left her with a brain injury, dozens of broken bones and pneumonia. “You’re not giving up, are you?” Dr. McCann asked her.
“No, I’m discouraged, but I’m not giving up,” Sister Jamesine replied in a strong voice.
He told her he worried that she now found herself with so little control. She nodded in stoic assent.
Some days, Dr. McCann said, he arrives with his “head spinning,” from hospitals and intensive-care units where death can be tortured, impersonal and wastefully expensive, only to find himself in a “different world where it’s really possible to focus on what’s important for people” and, he adds, “what’s exportable, what we can learn from an ideal environment like this.”
Laura L. Carstensen, the director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University, says the convent setting calms the tendency for public policy discussion about end-of-life treatment “to devolve into a debate about euthanasia or rationing health care based on age.”
“Every time I speak to a group about the need to improve the dying process, somebody raises their hand and says, ‘You’re talking about killing old people,’ ” Dr. Carstensen said. “But nobody would accuse Roman Catholic sisters of that. They could be a beacon in talking about this without it turning into that American black-and-white way of thinking: Either we have to throw everything we’ve got at keeping people alive or leave them on the sidewalk to die.”
Often the Roman Catholic position on end-of-life issues is misconstrued as “do anything and everything necessary” but nothing in Catholic theology demands extraordinary intervention, experts say, nor do the sisters here, or their resident chaplain, Msgr. William H. Shannon, 91, advocate euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.
“Killing somebody who is very, very old, with a pill or something, that isn’t right,” Sister Dorothy said. “But everybody has their own slant on life and death. It’s legitimate to say no to extraordinary means. And dying people, you can tell when they don’t want to eat or drink. That’s a natural thing.”
Barbara Cocilova, the nurse practitioner here, sees differences in the health of these sisters compared with elderly patients in other settings. None have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (perhaps because they do not smoke) and only three have diabetes (often caused by obesity). Among those with Alzheimer’s, Ms. Cocilova said, diagnostic tests tend to produce better-than-expected results among those who are further along in the disease process, a possible result of mental stimulation.
Dr. McCann and others say that the sisters benefit from advanced education, and new ventures in retirement that keep them active. Sister Jamesine was a lawyer who founded a legal clinic for Rochester’s working poor. Sister Mary Jane Mitchell was the first female chaplain in a federal penitentiary.
Sister Bernadine Frieda, 91, spry and sharp, spends her days visiting the infirm with Sister Marie Kellner, 77, both of them onetime science teachers. Sister Marie, who left the classroom because of multiple sclerosis, reminds an astounded sister with Alzheimer’s that she was once a high school principal (“I was?!”) and sings “Peace Is Like a River” to the dying.
“We don’t let anyone go alone on the last journey,” Sister Marie said.
Seven priests moved here in old age, paying their own way, as does Father Shannon, who presides over funerals that are more about the celebratory “alleluia” than the glum “De Profundis.” But he has been with the sisters since he entered the priesthood, first as a professor at Nazareth College, founded by the order, and now as their chaplain. He shares with them the security of knowing he will not die among strangers who have nothing in common but age and infirmity.
“This is what our culture, our society, is starved for, to be rich in relationships,” Sister Mary Lou said. “This is what everyone should have.”
This article did an excellent job of providing real world information on a very sensitive subject. Much needed light was shed. Often, people don't want to face the reality of their demise. Yet we should not be in denial, no matter how painful that realization is.
When my time comes, I hope that I, as well as my wife, will have the support and advice of such counselors. Change is not easy. This ultimate transition is no exception.
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