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Life Worth Giving
Amanda Witt on the Immeasurable Value of Wasted Lives
Today I and five other women served a funeral meal for a hundred mourners. The proceedings didn’t move me—the deceased was full of years, and besides, I’d never met her, though I did have to walk past her open casket to get to the church kitchen, hurrying my children, not because I was worried about their fragile little psyches but because I simply didn’t feel like coping with whatever questions or emotions a dead body might raise. I’d rearranged our complicated schedules and driven across town in icy weather to help serve the funeral meal; that was enough.
Having settled the kids in an empty classroom with their schoolbooks, I rolled up my sleeves and set to work preparing lunch. The other women in the kitchen had known the dead woman, and while we pulled pork and cut cake and stocked relish trays, they talked about her.
They had a 30-year-old picture of her taken at the church building site before the building went up; she had helped start the church youth camp; she had gotten old and gone to live near her children; she’d died and been shipped home to be buried beside her husband. She sounded, in sum, very much like any number of good church women I’d known over the years.
First She Got Pregnant
“I knew her best through our children,” one woman said to me. “Her middle daughter, the one she lost, was the same age as one of my kids.”
“The daughter died?” I asked, more focused on the package of buns I was trying to open. It was probably a car accident or cancer—the usual suspects.
“Well, first she . . . got pregnant.” The almost imperceptible hesitation made me think the girl hadn’t been married at the time. “Then it was one of those straight up-and-down decisions. The doctors could save either her life or the baby’s. She had a bad diabetic problem.”
I looked up from the buns. “She chose to save the baby?”
“Yes. She decided to save him and not herself, and that’s how she died.”
Another woman spoke up: “Who raised the boy?” They answered by naming a couple of women I didn’t know—first he lived with one, they said, then the other. What a hard beginning to a life, I thought. I wondered whether he turned out well, being raised without a mother or father, passed from hand to hand; I wondered what he had made of himself, whether his life was worth his mother’s death.
Amanda Witt discusses Christianity, culture, and life as a homeschooling mother at the weblog Wittingshire (www.wittingshire.blogspot.com). She lives with her husband and three children in Port Orchard, Washington.
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