A Sign Of God's Love
Stories
Object:
Contents
Sharing Visions: "A Sign of God's Love" by Marie Regine Redig, SSND
Good Stories: "You Shall Not Murder" by John Sumwalt
John's Scrap Pile: "Granny Dumping"
This week's StoryShare includes two pieces on the Ten Commandments - a story about murder plus some reflections on the fifth commandment, "Honor Your Father and Mother," which translated into modern parlance means "Thou Shalt Not Dump Granny!"
Easter is just a few weeks away. Send your best Easter material to jsumwalt@naspa.net (with StoryShare in the subject line). We will share a sampling of some of the best stories and sermons in our Easter season editions of StoryShare.
Sharing Visions
A Sign of God's Love
by Sister Marie Regine Redig, SSND
The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1
I am a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. On July 11, 1958, my mother passed away. Two weeks after her death, I was transferred from Chicago, and a large convent of 33 sisters whom I knew and loved, to a group of four in Morton, Illinois, near Peoria. I didn't know the other three sisters very well. We were starting a new school in a new parish. That was exciting in itself, but I felt holes in the middle of myself. I was 28 years old and this was my first experience of deep, personal grief. I had no idea of what was happening to me, and neither did the others. They were all young, too.
My love for life and fun seemed to be gone. I did my work as best I could, but it didn't energize me in the old way. I mourned my mother every day and missed my family and friends. I wondered what was wrong with me and if I was going a bit crazy. I didn't feel inclined to talk to the others about it, for fear they would confirm my psychic illness. Oh, if I had only known then what I would learn later: that allowing myself to be vulnerable in sharing and crying, in receiving love and compassion from others, is healing.
Nearly a year went by, and I went off on my annual six-day retreat. I was thoroughly miserable as I looked back over a year that I thought was a total waste. The joy of my religious life and ministry was gone, and I wondered if I would be able to go on.
On about the fourth day of my retreat, I was walking outside in a big field of grass. I was crying and looking down when I saw a tiny flower no bigger than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Its deep down center was red and the outer edge pink. I can see it as clearly today as then.
My attention was completely absorbed by it, and I breathed, "Oh, God, in this vast field, I'm the only one who will ever see this!" Quickly, the answer came back, "Yes, and it's yours, made just for you as a sign of my love." The impact of that moment brings a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes every time I share the story.
That moment did something to my insides. My spirit was touched and I began to feel like my old self, only much richer and wiser with the assurance of God's love.
Sister Marie Regine Redig, SSND, ministers as the coordinator of the Euens Spirituality Center at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, where she does individual spiritual direction and leads retreats. She is a member of Mary Queen of Martyrs Catholic Church. Write to her at rredig@ssnd-milw.org.
Good Stories
You Shall Not Murder
by John Sumwalt
There was once a man who was an active proponent of capital punishment. He wrote hundreds of letters to the editor, circulated petitions door to door, testified in public hearings, and lobbied his state legislators and congresspersons to enact strict laws requiring the death penalty for every kind of murder. "A life for a life," he was fond of saying. "That's what it says in the scriptures."
One day, after a party celebrating the enactment of one of the laws he had long sought, this same man drove his car the wrong way up a one-way street and crashed into a minivan carrying a mother and her two small children. The mother and one of the children died instantly. The other child died later in the hospital. A breathalyzer test proved the man guilty of drunk driving. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison. His lawyer assured him he would be out in a matter of months and would soon be driving again. As the sheriff's officer led the man out of the courtroom in handcuffs to begin serving his sentence, he was met on the courthouse steps by a group of demonstrators carrying signs which read "Death to Drunk Drivers!" and "Death to All Murderers!"
In that same community there was another man who was a strong advocate for the repeal of all death penalty laws. He wrote hundreds of letters to the editor, circulated petitions door to door, testified in public hearings, and led candlelight vigils outside the state prison on the nights before scheduled executions. "Blessed are the merciful," he was fond of saying, "for they will receive mercy."
One day, this man received word that his only daughter and his two grandchildren had been killed by a drunk driver in an automobile crash. He was calm at first, but as the days passed his grief turned to anger, and then to rage. It was all he could do to contain himself as he sat in the courtroom on the day that the killer was sentenced to only three years in prison. He knew this man who had so carelessly taken his daughter's life would be released in a matter of months. He watched helplessly as the police officer led the prisoner out of the courtroom and down the courthouse steps. He listened as the crowd began to chant "Death to drunk drivers!" and "Death to all murderers!" Then slowly, deliberately, as if in a dream, he pulled a gun from his pocket and began to fire at the man who had taken the light out of his life.
John's Scrap Pile
John McMorran, the oldest American man, died a few weeks ago at the age of 113. McMoran loved coffee and gave up cigars at 97. He was born June 19, 1889, in a log cabin in Michigan. The nation's oldest living person, according to the California-based Gerontology Research Group, is Mary Christian of San Pablo, California, born June 12, 1889. The oldest person in the world is 115-year-old Kamato Hongo of Japan, born September 16, 1887.
Some of the material in the following piece on the 5th commandment is dated. It is excerpted from Life Stories [link to 0-7880-0330-5], a study book Jo and I authored for CSS in 1995.
Granny Dumping
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12
Living to a "ripe old age" is not necessarily a blessing. Margaret Skeete, who was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest living American until her death in May of 1994 at the age of 115, professed not to be impressed by her longevity. "I guess that's something, but it doesn't buy me anything," she said on her 115th birthday. Mrs. Skeete had been a widow for 41 years and was preceded in death by two of her three children. She was living with her daughter at the time of her death.1
Mrs. Skeete was fortunate to have a child who was willing and able to take her in. She could have been living unhappily in a nursing home for years and years. And worse yet, she could have become one of the 70,000 elderly parents who are abandoned every year in the United States by family members who are unwilling or unable to care for them. "Granny dumping," as this abandonment is now known, was unheard of 15 years ago, according to John Meyers, a spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons. "Not a day goes by when a hospital emergency room somewhere in America doesn't have a case where some elderly person is abandoned, usually by the children."2
The most celebrated case of "granny dumping" was reported in March of 1992, after John Kingery, an 82-year-old Alzheimer's victim from Portland, Oregon, was abandoned by his daughter at an Idaho dog racing track. Oregon was the first state in the nation to arrange exemptions from the Medicaid laws to allow Medicaid to pay for adult care at home or with a foster family, thereby easing financial burdens on the family, but it hasn't prevented parent dumping. Ironically, there are gaps in the law that do not protect the elderly from such abandonment. In Idaho, where Mr. Kingery was found, it is illegal to abandon a dog or a child, but not an elderly person. In Oregon such an offense is punishable by up to a year in jail. Meyers says such abandonments are indicative of the terrible balancing act caregivers are stuck with, and it will only become worse. The number of people over age 65 is expected to reach 60 million by the year 2030, and those who suffer from Alzheimer's could reach 12 million by the year 2020.3
A double irony of John Kingery's case was reported by Ellen Goodman in her April 12, 1992 syndicated column. She related the story of Kingery's daughter Nancy, one of five children from a previous marriage, who had not been in contact with her father for the 28 years since he divorced their mother and remarried. When she recognized him from pictures accompanying the stories of his abandonment, she joyfully arranged to visit him in his nursing home. In Goodman's words:
The pathos in their nursing home reunion is hard to overstate. A 55-year-old woman tearfully and gratefully greeted an 82-year-old father who could no longer recognize her. "I didn't have a dad all those years," she said. "Now I have one." One who does not know his own name. Or hers. But a father all the same.
What a mix of family dramas in this sad tale. Granny dumping and kiddie dumping. Children who abandon their parents and parents who abandon their children. But what my ear picked up in Nancy Myatt's words was the simple, endless hunger of a child of any age for a father who disappeared.4
Concern and caring for one's parents is a frequent biblical theme. One of the last things Jesus did on the cross before he died was to see that his mother was cared for. He said to her, pointing to John, "Woman, behold your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home (John 19:26-27).
Honoring the old was so important in preserving the integrity of the family, and thus the whole fabric of society, that it was included as one of the Ten Commandments. Most of us have been familiar with these words since our training in Sunday school. It is a verse teachers often use to teach children to be obedient to their parents. However, this fifth commandment was not given for the benefit of Hebrew children. To a child growing up in a Jewish family this commandment would have been as superfluous as "thou must breathe" or "thou must eat." Like the other nine commandments, it is directed toward adult citizens. It warns them not to adopt the heathen practice of abandoning old people to the wild animals when they are ill or no longer economically useful. Some of the pagan nations of that time had a custom of leaving old people out in the wilderness to die when they were no longer able to care for themselves. Old people in Jewish society play an important role in handing down traditions and teaching its laws. The fifth commandment left no doubt about the value of the aged in the new nation God would establish for Israel in the promised land.5
On a deeper level the fifth commandment says that God was giving the promised land to the old as well as the young, and that the young could not expect to have a good life there in the future unless the old had a good life in the present. The way they treated their aged parents was the way they could expect to be treated by their children when they grew old.
This is just as true for us today. Many people dread retirement and fear old age because they have witnessed the unhappiness of some of their older relatives and friends. Deep down we fear that, like them, we may end our days with nothing meaningful to do, no money, no one who cares for us, and nowhere to live but a nursing home. We fear growing old because, as a society, we have not provided sufficiently for the needs of the elderly.
In recent years there have been advances in this area, but while the elderly may have many more benefits than they have ever had before in the form of social security, medicare, low-rent housing, advanced medical technology, and more modern nursing care facilities, they have lost something much more important than financial security. That is a significant role in society and the respect due old age. Many elderly people are given no useful function, and so have no purpose, no reason for being. They find meaning only in memories of times past, and they long for the day when death will relieve them of the emptiness of old age without honor.
Sharon Curtin recognized this problem when she wrote in her book Nobody Ever Died of Old Age:
Traditional roles for the aged have vanished. There are no quiet, warm spaces by the fireplace to sit and watch your grandchildren play, no cracker barrels to sit upon and speak of times past....We live in a culture which endorses what has been called human obsolescence. To the junk heap, the nursing home, the retirement village, the last resort....There is no security in old age.6
Ms. Curtin is right. And if there is no security in old age, there is no security at any age. She included the following story as a perfect example:
There is an old American folktale about a wooden bowl. It seems that Grandmother, with her trembling hands, was guilty of occasionally breaking a dish. Her daughter angrily gave her a wooden bowl and told her that she must eat out of it from now on. The young granddaughter, observing this, asked her mother why Grandmother must eat from a wooden bowl when the rest of the family was given china plates. "Because she is old," answered the mother. The child thought for a moment and then told her mother, "You must save the wooden bowl when Grandma dies." Her mother asked why, and the child replied, "For when you are old."7
Notes
1. Associated Press, "Oldest American Dies at 115," in The Kenosha News, May 8, 1994, pg. 2
2. Egan, Timothy, special to The New York Times, March 26, 1992, pg. A1.
3. Egan, pg. A9.
4. Goodman, Ellen, "Daughter Ditches Dad, But Another Finds Him," in The Kenosha News, April 12, 1992.
5. Buttrick, George A., Editor. The Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1952), Vol. 1, pg. 985.
6. Curtin, Sharon R. Nobody Ever Died of Old Age (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1972), pg. 17.
7. Curtin, pgs. 196-197.
(From Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making [link to 0-7880-0330-5], by John Sumwalt and Jo Perry-Sumwalt [Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1995].)
Additional Note: The following item came to my attention after the initial release of this installment. It questions some of the statistics from The New York Times article which we quoted from in the segment above on "Granny Dumping." This only goes to show that you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper ... even if it is The New York Times! This piece makes no mention of Ellen Goodman's column concerning the second daughter (also referenced above), which I think gets to the heart of the issue.
John Sumwalt
Crimes Nouveaux: Granny Dumping
The elderly can trust no one, politicians and reporters suggest. Everyone, including those entrusted to care for them, and even their own flesh and blood, may be potential victimizers.
"The American College of Emergency Physicians estimates that 70,000 elderly Americans were abandoned last year by family members unable or unwilling to care for them or pay for their care," the New York Times reported in an editorial that followed a front-page story heralding a major new trend. "Granny dumping," as it was called, attracted media attention after an incident in Idaho in 1992. John Kingery, a wheelchair-bound 82-year-old Alzheimer's patient who suffered from incontinence, was abandoned at a dog-racing track by his middle-aged daughter. "John Kingery is no isolated case," said the Times editorial, which, along with other accounts in the media, attributed granny dumping to the strains adult children endure in trying to care for their ailing parents.
In point of fact, however, John Kingery was a relatively isolated case. When Leslie Bennetts, a freelance writer and former New York Times reporter, looked more closely at the Kingery story several weeks later she discovered that Kingery's daughter had not been caring for her father in the first place; moreover, she had been stealing his pension and Social Security money. Bennetts also looked into how the Times had arrived at the alarming 70,000 figure and discovered it had not come from the American College of Emergency Physicians but rather from dubious extrapolations made by a Times reporter based on a casual, nonscientific survey that ACEP had conducted. Out of 900 emergency room doctors who had been sent a questionnaire only 169 responded, and they reported seeing an average of 8 abandoned elders per week. The Times reporter multiplied 8 by 52 weeks and then by 169 to produce the 70,000 statistic.
Even were this a reasonable way to come up with an incidence rate (which it is not), few actual incidents remotely resemble what happened to John Kingery. In the ACEP survey the definition of granny dumping was very broad: a woman who lived by herself and checked into an emergency room for help qualified. "Moreover," writes Bennetts in a debunking piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, "even a cursory check of emergency physicians reveals that the most common 'parent-dumping' problem is quite temporary, not the kind of permanent abandonment implied by the Times." A typical dumping incident consists of caretakers who put an old person in the hospital over a weekend so they can rest up for a couple of days.
Like Halloween sadism, workplace violence, gay-pedophile mass murder, and so many other crimes nouveaux, granny dumping was considerably less common, sensational, or pressing than the media made out. Like other scares about maltreatment of the elderly, the granny dumping scare played off the younger generations' guilt while letting the individual reader or viewer off the hook by focusing on particularly evil people.
Even in coverage of the sorry state of many of the nation's nursing homes, the root problems of lack of funding and inadequate oversight disappear amid overdrawn images of evil caretakers. "We found them coast to coast in the best of places. Thugs, rapists, suspected thieves," blares the announcer at the beginning of an edition of ABC's 20/20. "We caught them red-handed rifling through drawers in nursing homes, pocketing valuables and, worst of all, abusing your elderly loved ones." The story, which takes up most of the broadcast, relays incident upon incident of nursing home aides with lengthy criminal records who allegedly robbed and mistreated residents. "Most nursing home owners are not a bit careful about who they hire," someone identified as a former nursing home inspector says, and ABC correspondent Catherine Crier tells of patients being raped and beaten.
Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive "is notoriously low" for a job that is "difficult and often unpleasant." Nor does the report deal with problems that, unlike rape and other forms of assault, occur on a regular basis in American nursing homes. (According to some reports, 40 percent of nursing home residents suffer from malnutrition, to take one urgent example.)
No, as Crier herself says at the very beginning of her report, "This is not a story about bad conditions in nursing homes, it's about bad people who end up working there." It is, in other words, another in the endless cache of stories about villains and victims, stories in which real people in their real complexity and the real dangers they and the larger society face can be glimpsed only in the shadows.
(Excerpted from The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner [Basic Books, 2000].) The text may be found on the website for Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine:
http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/fear/10.php
StoryShare, March 23, 2003, issue.
Copyright 2003 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
Additional Note: The following item came to my attention after the initial release of this installment. It questions some of the statistics from The New York Times article which we quoted from in the segment above on "Granny Dumping." This only goes to show that you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper ... even if it is The New York Times! This piece makes no mention of Ellen Goodman's column concerning the second daughter (also referenced above), which I think gets to the heart of the issue. John Sumwalt Crimes Nouveaux: Granny Dumping The elderly can trust no one, politicians and reporters suggest. Everyone, including those entrusted to care for them, and even their own flesh and blood, may be potential victimizers. "The American College of Emergency Physicians estimates that 70,000 elderly Americans were abandoned last year by family members unable or unwilling to care for them or pay for their care," the New York Times reported in an editorial that followed a front-page story heralding a major new trend. "Granny dumping," as it was called, attracted media attention after an incident in Idaho in 1992. John Kingery, a wheelchair-bound 82-year-old Alzheimer's patient who suffered from incontinence, was abandoned at a dog-racing track by his middle-aged daughter. "John Kingery is no isolated case," said the Times editorial, which, along with other accounts in the media, attributed granny dumping to the strains adult children endure in trying to care for their ailing parents. In point of fact, however, John Kingery was a relatively isolated case. When Leslie Bennetts, a freelance writer and former New York Times reporter, looked more closely at the Kingery story several weeks later she discovered that Kingery's daughter had not been caring for her father in the first place; moreover, she had been stealing his pension and Social Security money. Bennetts also looked into how the Times had arrived at the alarming 70,000 figure and discovered it had not come from the American College of Emergency Physicians but rather from dubious extrapolations made by a Times reporter based on a casual, nonscientific survey that ACEP had conducted. Out of 900 emergency room doctors who had been sent a questionnaire only 169 responded, and they reported seeing an average of 8 abandoned elders per week. The Times reporter multiplied 8 by 52 weeks and then by 169 to produce the 70,000 statistic. Even were this a reasonable way to come up with an incidence rate (which it is not), few actual incidents remotely resemble what happened to John Kingery. In the ACEP survey the definition of granny dumping was very broad: a woman who lived by herself and checked into an emergency room for help qualified. "Moreover," writes Bennetts in a debunking piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, "even a cursory check of emergency physicians reveals that the most common 'parent-dumping' problem is quite temporary, not the kind of permanent abandonment implied by the Times." A typical dumping incident consists of caretakers who put an old person in the hospital over a weekend so they can rest up for a couple of days. Like Halloween sadism, workplace violence, gay-pedophile mass murder, and so many other crimes nouveaux, granny dumping was considerably less common, sensational, or pressing than the media made out. Like other scares about maltreatment of the elderly, the granny dumping scare played off the younger generations' guilt while letting the individual reader or viewer off the hook by focusing on particularly evil people. Even in coverage of the sorry state of many of the nation's nursing homes, the root problems of lack of funding and inadequate oversight disappear amid overdrawn images of evil caretakers. "We found them coast to coast in the best of places. Thugs, rapists, suspected thieves," blares the announcer at the beginning of an edition of ABC's 20/20. "We caught them red-handed rifling through drawers in nursing homes, pocketing valuables and, worst of all, abusing your elderly loved ones." The story, which takes up most of the broadcast, relays incident upon incident of nursing home aides with lengthy criminal records who allegedly robbed and mistreated residents. "Most nursing home owners are not a bit careful about who they hire," someone identified as a former nursing home inspector says, and ABC correspondent Catherine Crier tells of patients being raped and beaten. Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive "is notoriously low" for a job that is "difficult and often unpleasant." Nor does the report deal with problems that, unlike rape and other forms of assault, occur on a regular basis in American nursing homes. (According to some reports, 40 percent of nursing home residents suffer from malnutrition, to take one urgent example.) No, as Crier herself says at the very beginning of her report, "This is not a story about bad conditions in nursing homes, it's about bad people who end up working there." It is, in other words, another in the endless cache of stories about villains and victims, stories in which real people in their real complexity and the real dangers they and the larger society face can be glimpsed only in the shadows. (Excerpted from The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner [Basic Books, 2000].) The text may be found on the website for Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine: http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/fear/10.php
Sharing Visions: "A Sign of God's Love" by Marie Regine Redig, SSND
Good Stories: "You Shall Not Murder" by John Sumwalt
John's Scrap Pile: "Granny Dumping"
This week's StoryShare includes two pieces on the Ten Commandments - a story about murder plus some reflections on the fifth commandment, "Honor Your Father and Mother," which translated into modern parlance means "Thou Shalt Not Dump Granny!"
Easter is just a few weeks away. Send your best Easter material to jsumwalt@naspa.net (with StoryShare in the subject line). We will share a sampling of some of the best stories and sermons in our Easter season editions of StoryShare.
Sharing Visions
A Sign of God's Love
by Sister Marie Regine Redig, SSND
The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1
I am a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. On July 11, 1958, my mother passed away. Two weeks after her death, I was transferred from Chicago, and a large convent of 33 sisters whom I knew and loved, to a group of four in Morton, Illinois, near Peoria. I didn't know the other three sisters very well. We were starting a new school in a new parish. That was exciting in itself, but I felt holes in the middle of myself. I was 28 years old and this was my first experience of deep, personal grief. I had no idea of what was happening to me, and neither did the others. They were all young, too.
My love for life and fun seemed to be gone. I did my work as best I could, but it didn't energize me in the old way. I mourned my mother every day and missed my family and friends. I wondered what was wrong with me and if I was going a bit crazy. I didn't feel inclined to talk to the others about it, for fear they would confirm my psychic illness. Oh, if I had only known then what I would learn later: that allowing myself to be vulnerable in sharing and crying, in receiving love and compassion from others, is healing.
Nearly a year went by, and I went off on my annual six-day retreat. I was thoroughly miserable as I looked back over a year that I thought was a total waste. The joy of my religious life and ministry was gone, and I wondered if I would be able to go on.
On about the fourth day of my retreat, I was walking outside in a big field of grass. I was crying and looking down when I saw a tiny flower no bigger than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Its deep down center was red and the outer edge pink. I can see it as clearly today as then.
My attention was completely absorbed by it, and I breathed, "Oh, God, in this vast field, I'm the only one who will ever see this!" Quickly, the answer came back, "Yes, and it's yours, made just for you as a sign of my love." The impact of that moment brings a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes every time I share the story.
That moment did something to my insides. My spirit was touched and I began to feel like my old self, only much richer and wiser with the assurance of God's love.
Sister Marie Regine Redig, SSND, ministers as the coordinator of the Euens Spirituality Center at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, where she does individual spiritual direction and leads retreats. She is a member of Mary Queen of Martyrs Catholic Church. Write to her at rredig@ssnd-milw.org.
Good Stories
You Shall Not Murder
by John Sumwalt
There was once a man who was an active proponent of capital punishment. He wrote hundreds of letters to the editor, circulated petitions door to door, testified in public hearings, and lobbied his state legislators and congresspersons to enact strict laws requiring the death penalty for every kind of murder. "A life for a life," he was fond of saying. "That's what it says in the scriptures."
One day, after a party celebrating the enactment of one of the laws he had long sought, this same man drove his car the wrong way up a one-way street and crashed into a minivan carrying a mother and her two small children. The mother and one of the children died instantly. The other child died later in the hospital. A breathalyzer test proved the man guilty of drunk driving. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison. His lawyer assured him he would be out in a matter of months and would soon be driving again. As the sheriff's officer led the man out of the courtroom in handcuffs to begin serving his sentence, he was met on the courthouse steps by a group of demonstrators carrying signs which read "Death to Drunk Drivers!" and "Death to All Murderers!"
In that same community there was another man who was a strong advocate for the repeal of all death penalty laws. He wrote hundreds of letters to the editor, circulated petitions door to door, testified in public hearings, and led candlelight vigils outside the state prison on the nights before scheduled executions. "Blessed are the merciful," he was fond of saying, "for they will receive mercy."
One day, this man received word that his only daughter and his two grandchildren had been killed by a drunk driver in an automobile crash. He was calm at first, but as the days passed his grief turned to anger, and then to rage. It was all he could do to contain himself as he sat in the courtroom on the day that the killer was sentenced to only three years in prison. He knew this man who had so carelessly taken his daughter's life would be released in a matter of months. He watched helplessly as the police officer led the prisoner out of the courtroom and down the courthouse steps. He listened as the crowd began to chant "Death to drunk drivers!" and "Death to all murderers!" Then slowly, deliberately, as if in a dream, he pulled a gun from his pocket and began to fire at the man who had taken the light out of his life.
John's Scrap Pile
John McMorran, the oldest American man, died a few weeks ago at the age of 113. McMoran loved coffee and gave up cigars at 97. He was born June 19, 1889, in a log cabin in Michigan. The nation's oldest living person, according to the California-based Gerontology Research Group, is Mary Christian of San Pablo, California, born June 12, 1889. The oldest person in the world is 115-year-old Kamato Hongo of Japan, born September 16, 1887.
Some of the material in the following piece on the 5th commandment is dated. It is excerpted from Life Stories [link to 0-7880-0330-5], a study book Jo and I authored for CSS in 1995.
Granny Dumping
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12
Living to a "ripe old age" is not necessarily a blessing. Margaret Skeete, who was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest living American until her death in May of 1994 at the age of 115, professed not to be impressed by her longevity. "I guess that's something, but it doesn't buy me anything," she said on her 115th birthday. Mrs. Skeete had been a widow for 41 years and was preceded in death by two of her three children. She was living with her daughter at the time of her death.1
Mrs. Skeete was fortunate to have a child who was willing and able to take her in. She could have been living unhappily in a nursing home for years and years. And worse yet, she could have become one of the 70,000 elderly parents who are abandoned every year in the United States by family members who are unwilling or unable to care for them. "Granny dumping," as this abandonment is now known, was unheard of 15 years ago, according to John Meyers, a spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons. "Not a day goes by when a hospital emergency room somewhere in America doesn't have a case where some elderly person is abandoned, usually by the children."2
The most celebrated case of "granny dumping" was reported in March of 1992, after John Kingery, an 82-year-old Alzheimer's victim from Portland, Oregon, was abandoned by his daughter at an Idaho dog racing track. Oregon was the first state in the nation to arrange exemptions from the Medicaid laws to allow Medicaid to pay for adult care at home or with a foster family, thereby easing financial burdens on the family, but it hasn't prevented parent dumping. Ironically, there are gaps in the law that do not protect the elderly from such abandonment. In Idaho, where Mr. Kingery was found, it is illegal to abandon a dog or a child, but not an elderly person. In Oregon such an offense is punishable by up to a year in jail. Meyers says such abandonments are indicative of the terrible balancing act caregivers are stuck with, and it will only become worse. The number of people over age 65 is expected to reach 60 million by the year 2030, and those who suffer from Alzheimer's could reach 12 million by the year 2020.3
A double irony of John Kingery's case was reported by Ellen Goodman in her April 12, 1992 syndicated column. She related the story of Kingery's daughter Nancy, one of five children from a previous marriage, who had not been in contact with her father for the 28 years since he divorced their mother and remarried. When she recognized him from pictures accompanying the stories of his abandonment, she joyfully arranged to visit him in his nursing home. In Goodman's words:
The pathos in their nursing home reunion is hard to overstate. A 55-year-old woman tearfully and gratefully greeted an 82-year-old father who could no longer recognize her. "I didn't have a dad all those years," she said. "Now I have one." One who does not know his own name. Or hers. But a father all the same.
What a mix of family dramas in this sad tale. Granny dumping and kiddie dumping. Children who abandon their parents and parents who abandon their children. But what my ear picked up in Nancy Myatt's words was the simple, endless hunger of a child of any age for a father who disappeared.4
Concern and caring for one's parents is a frequent biblical theme. One of the last things Jesus did on the cross before he died was to see that his mother was cared for. He said to her, pointing to John, "Woman, behold your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home (John 19:26-27).
Honoring the old was so important in preserving the integrity of the family, and thus the whole fabric of society, that it was included as one of the Ten Commandments. Most of us have been familiar with these words since our training in Sunday school. It is a verse teachers often use to teach children to be obedient to their parents. However, this fifth commandment was not given for the benefit of Hebrew children. To a child growing up in a Jewish family this commandment would have been as superfluous as "thou must breathe" or "thou must eat." Like the other nine commandments, it is directed toward adult citizens. It warns them not to adopt the heathen practice of abandoning old people to the wild animals when they are ill or no longer economically useful. Some of the pagan nations of that time had a custom of leaving old people out in the wilderness to die when they were no longer able to care for themselves. Old people in Jewish society play an important role in handing down traditions and teaching its laws. The fifth commandment left no doubt about the value of the aged in the new nation God would establish for Israel in the promised land.5
On a deeper level the fifth commandment says that God was giving the promised land to the old as well as the young, and that the young could not expect to have a good life there in the future unless the old had a good life in the present. The way they treated their aged parents was the way they could expect to be treated by their children when they grew old.
This is just as true for us today. Many people dread retirement and fear old age because they have witnessed the unhappiness of some of their older relatives and friends. Deep down we fear that, like them, we may end our days with nothing meaningful to do, no money, no one who cares for us, and nowhere to live but a nursing home. We fear growing old because, as a society, we have not provided sufficiently for the needs of the elderly.
In recent years there have been advances in this area, but while the elderly may have many more benefits than they have ever had before in the form of social security, medicare, low-rent housing, advanced medical technology, and more modern nursing care facilities, they have lost something much more important than financial security. That is a significant role in society and the respect due old age. Many elderly people are given no useful function, and so have no purpose, no reason for being. They find meaning only in memories of times past, and they long for the day when death will relieve them of the emptiness of old age without honor.
Sharon Curtin recognized this problem when she wrote in her book Nobody Ever Died of Old Age:
Traditional roles for the aged have vanished. There are no quiet, warm spaces by the fireplace to sit and watch your grandchildren play, no cracker barrels to sit upon and speak of times past....We live in a culture which endorses what has been called human obsolescence. To the junk heap, the nursing home, the retirement village, the last resort....There is no security in old age.6
Ms. Curtin is right. And if there is no security in old age, there is no security at any age. She included the following story as a perfect example:
There is an old American folktale about a wooden bowl. It seems that Grandmother, with her trembling hands, was guilty of occasionally breaking a dish. Her daughter angrily gave her a wooden bowl and told her that she must eat out of it from now on. The young granddaughter, observing this, asked her mother why Grandmother must eat from a wooden bowl when the rest of the family was given china plates. "Because she is old," answered the mother. The child thought for a moment and then told her mother, "You must save the wooden bowl when Grandma dies." Her mother asked why, and the child replied, "For when you are old."7
Notes
1. Associated Press, "Oldest American Dies at 115," in The Kenosha News, May 8, 1994, pg. 2
2. Egan, Timothy, special to The New York Times, March 26, 1992, pg. A1.
3. Egan, pg. A9.
4. Goodman, Ellen, "Daughter Ditches Dad, But Another Finds Him," in The Kenosha News, April 12, 1992.
5. Buttrick, George A., Editor. The Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1952), Vol. 1, pg. 985.
6. Curtin, Sharon R. Nobody Ever Died of Old Age (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1972), pg. 17.
7. Curtin, pgs. 196-197.
(From Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making [link to 0-7880-0330-5], by John Sumwalt and Jo Perry-Sumwalt [Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1995].)
Additional Note: The following item came to my attention after the initial release of this installment. It questions some of the statistics from The New York Times article which we quoted from in the segment above on "Granny Dumping." This only goes to show that you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper ... even if it is The New York Times! This piece makes no mention of Ellen Goodman's column concerning the second daughter (also referenced above), which I think gets to the heart of the issue.
John Sumwalt
Crimes Nouveaux: Granny Dumping
The elderly can trust no one, politicians and reporters suggest. Everyone, including those entrusted to care for them, and even their own flesh and blood, may be potential victimizers.
"The American College of Emergency Physicians estimates that 70,000 elderly Americans were abandoned last year by family members unable or unwilling to care for them or pay for their care," the New York Times reported in an editorial that followed a front-page story heralding a major new trend. "Granny dumping," as it was called, attracted media attention after an incident in Idaho in 1992. John Kingery, a wheelchair-bound 82-year-old Alzheimer's patient who suffered from incontinence, was abandoned at a dog-racing track by his middle-aged daughter. "John Kingery is no isolated case," said the Times editorial, which, along with other accounts in the media, attributed granny dumping to the strains adult children endure in trying to care for their ailing parents.
In point of fact, however, John Kingery was a relatively isolated case. When Leslie Bennetts, a freelance writer and former New York Times reporter, looked more closely at the Kingery story several weeks later she discovered that Kingery's daughter had not been caring for her father in the first place; moreover, she had been stealing his pension and Social Security money. Bennetts also looked into how the Times had arrived at the alarming 70,000 figure and discovered it had not come from the American College of Emergency Physicians but rather from dubious extrapolations made by a Times reporter based on a casual, nonscientific survey that ACEP had conducted. Out of 900 emergency room doctors who had been sent a questionnaire only 169 responded, and they reported seeing an average of 8 abandoned elders per week. The Times reporter multiplied 8 by 52 weeks and then by 169 to produce the 70,000 statistic.
Even were this a reasonable way to come up with an incidence rate (which it is not), few actual incidents remotely resemble what happened to John Kingery. In the ACEP survey the definition of granny dumping was very broad: a woman who lived by herself and checked into an emergency room for help qualified. "Moreover," writes Bennetts in a debunking piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, "even a cursory check of emergency physicians reveals that the most common 'parent-dumping' problem is quite temporary, not the kind of permanent abandonment implied by the Times." A typical dumping incident consists of caretakers who put an old person in the hospital over a weekend so they can rest up for a couple of days.
Like Halloween sadism, workplace violence, gay-pedophile mass murder, and so many other crimes nouveaux, granny dumping was considerably less common, sensational, or pressing than the media made out. Like other scares about maltreatment of the elderly, the granny dumping scare played off the younger generations' guilt while letting the individual reader or viewer off the hook by focusing on particularly evil people.
Even in coverage of the sorry state of many of the nation's nursing homes, the root problems of lack of funding and inadequate oversight disappear amid overdrawn images of evil caretakers. "We found them coast to coast in the best of places. Thugs, rapists, suspected thieves," blares the announcer at the beginning of an edition of ABC's 20/20. "We caught them red-handed rifling through drawers in nursing homes, pocketing valuables and, worst of all, abusing your elderly loved ones." The story, which takes up most of the broadcast, relays incident upon incident of nursing home aides with lengthy criminal records who allegedly robbed and mistreated residents. "Most nursing home owners are not a bit careful about who they hire," someone identified as a former nursing home inspector says, and ABC correspondent Catherine Crier tells of patients being raped and beaten.
Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive "is notoriously low" for a job that is "difficult and often unpleasant." Nor does the report deal with problems that, unlike rape and other forms of assault, occur on a regular basis in American nursing homes. (According to some reports, 40 percent of nursing home residents suffer from malnutrition, to take one urgent example.)
No, as Crier herself says at the very beginning of her report, "This is not a story about bad conditions in nursing homes, it's about bad people who end up working there." It is, in other words, another in the endless cache of stories about villains and victims, stories in which real people in their real complexity and the real dangers they and the larger society face can be glimpsed only in the shadows.
(Excerpted from The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner [Basic Books, 2000].) The text may be found on the website for Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine:
http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/fear/10.php
StoryShare, March 23, 2003, issue.
Copyright 2003 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
Additional Note: The following item came to my attention after the initial release of this installment. It questions some of the statistics from The New York Times article which we quoted from in the segment above on "Granny Dumping." This only goes to show that you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper ... even if it is The New York Times! This piece makes no mention of Ellen Goodman's column concerning the second daughter (also referenced above), which I think gets to the heart of the issue. John Sumwalt Crimes Nouveaux: Granny Dumping The elderly can trust no one, politicians and reporters suggest. Everyone, including those entrusted to care for them, and even their own flesh and blood, may be potential victimizers. "The American College of Emergency Physicians estimates that 70,000 elderly Americans were abandoned last year by family members unable or unwilling to care for them or pay for their care," the New York Times reported in an editorial that followed a front-page story heralding a major new trend. "Granny dumping," as it was called, attracted media attention after an incident in Idaho in 1992. John Kingery, a wheelchair-bound 82-year-old Alzheimer's patient who suffered from incontinence, was abandoned at a dog-racing track by his middle-aged daughter. "John Kingery is no isolated case," said the Times editorial, which, along with other accounts in the media, attributed granny dumping to the strains adult children endure in trying to care for their ailing parents. In point of fact, however, John Kingery was a relatively isolated case. When Leslie Bennetts, a freelance writer and former New York Times reporter, looked more closely at the Kingery story several weeks later she discovered that Kingery's daughter had not been caring for her father in the first place; moreover, she had been stealing his pension and Social Security money. Bennetts also looked into how the Times had arrived at the alarming 70,000 figure and discovered it had not come from the American College of Emergency Physicians but rather from dubious extrapolations made by a Times reporter based on a casual, nonscientific survey that ACEP had conducted. Out of 900 emergency room doctors who had been sent a questionnaire only 169 responded, and they reported seeing an average of 8 abandoned elders per week. The Times reporter multiplied 8 by 52 weeks and then by 169 to produce the 70,000 statistic. Even were this a reasonable way to come up with an incidence rate (which it is not), few actual incidents remotely resemble what happened to John Kingery. In the ACEP survey the definition of granny dumping was very broad: a woman who lived by herself and checked into an emergency room for help qualified. "Moreover," writes Bennetts in a debunking piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, "even a cursory check of emergency physicians reveals that the most common 'parent-dumping' problem is quite temporary, not the kind of permanent abandonment implied by the Times." A typical dumping incident consists of caretakers who put an old person in the hospital over a weekend so they can rest up for a couple of days. Like Halloween sadism, workplace violence, gay-pedophile mass murder, and so many other crimes nouveaux, granny dumping was considerably less common, sensational, or pressing than the media made out. Like other scares about maltreatment of the elderly, the granny dumping scare played off the younger generations' guilt while letting the individual reader or viewer off the hook by focusing on particularly evil people. Even in coverage of the sorry state of many of the nation's nursing homes, the root problems of lack of funding and inadequate oversight disappear amid overdrawn images of evil caretakers. "We found them coast to coast in the best of places. Thugs, rapists, suspected thieves," blares the announcer at the beginning of an edition of ABC's 20/20. "We caught them red-handed rifling through drawers in nursing homes, pocketing valuables and, worst of all, abusing your elderly loved ones." The story, which takes up most of the broadcast, relays incident upon incident of nursing home aides with lengthy criminal records who allegedly robbed and mistreated residents. "Most nursing home owners are not a bit careful about who they hire," someone identified as a former nursing home inspector says, and ABC correspondent Catherine Crier tells of patients being raped and beaten. Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive "is notoriously low" for a job that is "difficult and often unpleasant." Nor does the report deal with problems that, unlike rape and other forms of assault, occur on a regular basis in American nursing homes. (According to some reports, 40 percent of nursing home residents suffer from malnutrition, to take one urgent example.) No, as Crier herself says at the very beginning of her report, "This is not a story about bad conditions in nursing homes, it's about bad people who end up working there." It is, in other words, another in the endless cache of stories about villains and victims, stories in which real people in their real complexity and the real dangers they and the larger society face can be glimpsed only in the shadows. (Excerpted from The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner [Basic Books, 2000].) The text may be found on the website for Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine: http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/fear/10.php
