It's usually said with a flippancy between people who've absorbed a "How are you?" greeting that may or may not be sincere: "Oh, could be worse."
Until two Saturday nights ago, everybody in my family had someone nearby who was the living example of that: My cousin Monica. Her death was merciful. Her life was what was tragic.
Monica Lynn Olen was 67 when she passed, quietly, in hospice care. Sickened by many ailments through her life, its length quite amazed anyone who was at all connected with her.
But that connection was as sad as anything I've seen. Monica Lynn Olen was extremely mentally challenged from birth. She did not have the mental acuity of a one-year-old. She was very marginally functional.
Her parents, Joe and Genevieve, bravely saw her through most of her life until they themselves wore down and let an institution handle it. Their lives were deeply changed by their daughter's condition.
They couldn't take long trips without her. By 'long,' was meant to places like northern Wisconsin from Milwaukee, sometimes accompanied by Genevieve's brother, my dad, and my mom, her godmother. They shared her parents' remarkable patience and an effort to at least play with her and please her to the extent to which it could be demonstrably done.
After retirement, the Olens could have traveled to many places. They had enough money. But there was always Monica, and many of those plans simply never got made or considered. By the time the parents finally let go of personal care and let an institution handle Monica, they were too old to do much traveling. They had fulfilled their responsibility many times over. Remarkably, they did not salve their frustrations through excesses. They must have prayed a lot. They must have been incredibly strong.
But they transferred that strength to giving Monica a life as decent as could be provided. They stubbornly stared down their undeserved fate and made Monica a participant in all family activities, dressing her neatly and appropriately, making sure she was front and center in pictures. Funeral providers make sure such pictures are displayed at casket viewing; there you could see that Monica posed with family naturally and even with a distinct sense of style. She even had a sensibility of photogenesis about her. She was buried with one of her signature hats.
Monica had moods of happiness and sadness. She resisted, at times, meaningful care. Maladies and illnesses were detected, but far later than they could have if she could have communicated them in any decipherable way. She could not have known much of anything, at least in the way any of you reading this knows anything else. The few words she spoke were repeated endlessly and never put together in a way they could be tacitly interpreted. The rest of us have and will have our fears, but words can put frames around it so that they can be handled. That never existed for her.
She had little sense of social interaction outside of her parents and aunts and uncles and big sister, Ronnie, now the only member of that family to survive. Ronnie lost her husband quite early to severe diabetes, but raised two sons with him. Another sister, Maria, had been stillborn.
Since she grew an appropriate female anatomy, Monica was sterilized, lest she be somehow taken advantage of. Nobody discussed it, but I am quite sure she never knew the meaning of that surgery. Within a mongoloid visage, there was a slight family resemblance.
She wanted to be hugged most of all. She knew one name, "Eugene," probably adapted by her mother's calling my dad that when she wanted his attention. To her, everybody was "Eugene" except her parents: "Momma," and "Daddy." There wasn't much of an indication that she knew much of anything else.
She would go into instantaneous outcries of complete nonsensical phraseology, most of the time ending in laughter. I always wondered whether she was mimicking the laughter of her mother, or somehow within her limited mentality found something to laugh at. It left you with at least the glimmer of a hope that she was a relatively happy child, unable to absorb angst or anticipation of fear. It was left to us to wonder.
The institution prepared for her did its best. Monica appeared when her parents died, but had no idea who was in the casket--or if she did, had no idea why. She could be trained to use a spoon, but never a knife.
Of course this is incredibly pitiful. You have to wonder why life extends so far in such a direction, where someone is so helpless that they've needed assistance literally from birth to death, not being left alone except for playing with toys within the same house, and then for little more than five minutes because she could be doing anything to anything and not know why. You have to wonder how much of a life ever really existed, and what value it had, so far removed from a decent life as we have come to understand it.
She was loved deeply, yes, and there were brief, happy moments, but with no growth, no development, no hope, the emotional price her parents had to pay had to be staggering. I've never been a parent, but it seems to me that one of the gradual gifts of that role is to watch a child become independent so worries about functionality ebb with gentle gratitude. You see it all on Facebook and of course, it's displayed with pride--the pride of having raised children decently and normally. There cannot be better pride than that. It is selfish, yes, but a kind of deserved selfishness that no one ever questions. But Uncle Joe and Aunt Gen never had that with Monica, though they could claim a kind of maintenance that others might not have accomplished.
Monica needed the same amount of help every single minute of every single day of every single week. Nobody should be made to be that unselfish. Uncle Joe started in teaching and became a school administrator, and Aunt Gen worked in a bank. They would turn Monica over to a "school," so to speak, during the day. Perhaps work was a release for them. But perhaps their pride was even greater. It was either that, or give way to shame. There was no reason for that.
The mental strain had to be enormous because it was unrelenting. How do you raise an infant for more than five decades? Uncle Joe and Aunt Gen were as close to saints as there ever could be to withstand the endless sadness--good, decent people who were burdened by an inexplicably awful stroke of luck. There had to be many long, sleepless nights. They accepted their fate with grit, though, and got on with it. But did they have to? Did they have to accept all those years under their own roof and give up the kinds of lives many of the rest of us know is out there? Couldn't they have, shouldn't they have, turned Monica over to an institution far sooner than they did, when they had run out of energy?
I leave that evaluation to you. But whenever I said "Could be worse," sooner or later I'd think of her and say to myself, No question. If her life had only that value, then maybe it was worth it to view one of the worst possible outcomes of something that's supposed to be terrific so you could say to yourself: Whatever's wrong, it can't be worse than she's got it. Beyond that, too, there was always relief that you didn't have to deal with it.
Monica was born in 1954, when thoughts of pregnancy termination were reserved only for saving the life of the mother; Roe v. Wade wasn't even on the horizon. I never asked, but we all knew: To my aunt and uncle, termination was unthinkable. Strict Catholics, religion guided their choices throughout her lives. I never heard them complain. We all watched helplessly.
In a state as big as Texas, though, there are some pretty good odds that such births will continue to take place, being no one's fault. Right now, because of a twisted, sprint-to-the-finish-line attempt to turn back Roe v. Wade, women just six weeks pregnant not only cannot end such pregnancies, but if they are caught doing so by citizens like you and me, without any training or understanding of the situation, they can be turned in to the law with a $10,000 bounty. It has already been solicited by people from other states.
That is disgustingly harsh, cruel and repressive. It is coercion that robs women of the basic rights of controlling their bodies. I have seen the prices decent people paid because they believed that their own senses of morality gave them no choice, but they were and are absurdly high for the overriding majority of modern women and parents. They certainly shouldn't be left to anyone but those making the decisions themselves. It betrays the expectations of a free society.
The awful Texas law may yet be turned back by the Supreme Court, but it will be close. As it is, five justices are allowing Texas' law to stand rather than immediately belay it until it actually hears the case--thus allowing several other states with like-minded political backwardness to pass similar laws and create a kind of default, connected bulwark of resistance. Thus, starting Sept. 1, and until that hearing which will take time to organize and litigate and new, restrictive practices will have that time to congeal, a Texas woman just six weeks pregnant, often before she even knows it, is helpless to choose anything within the state's borders but birth, regardless of fetal condition or outlook. For many women, it will be an awful ambush and trap. It will certainly mean an expense that many cannot afford.
If you knew such a child as Monica would be produced by your pregnancy--much easier to detect now because of the technology--wouldn't you even give it a thought, as a rational human being would? Could you be blamed for doing so? Would a belief in the almighty block any sense of propriety, especially now that the technology permits options?
And what is propriety in such a situation? It cannot be decided from afar, by a one-size-fits-all, door-slamming legislation that makes no exceptions, that refuses to accept that life does not and cannot possibly cover all situations.
Who in their right mind would remove such choices from any woman, force parents to go through decade after decade of intensive, endless care? Who would drive such a perverted sense of 'morality,' if you could call it that, down a woman's throat simply because she became pregnant--married or not?
It would not be humane in any sense. It would be the ultimate in misogyny. If this awful law is allowed to stand, we will fall back to the kind of society we thought we left behind decades ago, one in which even sexuality will be judged and measured and regulated, in which women are mere objects.
Few know it, but at the time of the signing of our Constitution, the generally accepted rule concerning abortion was much like that of what Harry Blackmun set forth in his famous opinion in Roe: unchallengeable until 'quickening,' when the mother could feel the fetus moving within her. What was socially permitted has now become thoroughly unacceptable in the minds of excessively religious absolutists, the ones who never had Monicas in their lives, those who never considered the adoption for which they advocate.
It will set off a political chaos and firestorm the likes of which we thought we left behind. It will inch us closer to bringing back the master of chaos, the filthy, amoral liar who, in the name of political convenience and cultism, brought in the purveyors of religiosity that he manipulated but neither shared their beliefs or cared one whit about.
If you thought we had a mess before, just wait. Abortion, legal and illegal, will never be eradicated in this country, but legal access to it may soon be seriously diminished.
I was asked to read from the Bible at Monica's funeral service. I obliged. Whatever I could do to help get this little angel to her final reward was something I was glad to do.
Life is a mystery, to make of it what we will, filled with issues that beg answers that are comprehensive, simple, and never completely right. To Monica, it was just more of a mystery. All the more to cherish whatever we have left of it.
Maybe now Monica will have the joy she deserves, the joy she could not possibly understand while here, if it is possible to do so. Her fears are now gone, gratefully.
Did she have a soul? As much as we would like to think of that, the answer has to be no. Soul is conscience, from what we can gather. She did not have to, could not, make the kinds of decisions that drive our lives; they were all made for her. Maybe she was put here for us to consider our own souls and what we are doing with them.
Is there a place in eternity for such people? We'll all see that when we get there. That we can imagine it is a salve to the emotional wasteland to which we would otherwise be condemned. We will not think otherwise. We don't have to. We'd rather not.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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