My brother Bill’s standard response to my “How are you doing?” was a bitter, “Oh, you know, living the dream.” Years ago, he’d owned a Texaco gas station. Then a freeway upgrade closed the offramp to his station, putting him into bankruptcy and back to working for others. Bill spent the last twelve years of his working life in a body shop realigning car tires after collision repairs—it was skilled but repetitive work. Work that was hard on an aging body and corrosive to the spirit. Work that had ground him down.
Unable to afford both a car and a Harley Davidson, he rode his motorcycle year-round. It had taken me years to tumble to the fact that his email address contained the phrase bigwilly because he was bragging about his penis to attract biker babes. I gathered that his social life centered on the bar at Chan’s. I hoped its proximity to home improved the chances that he’d get home safely on nights when he had a few too many.
It was rare that Bill would reach out to me or even respond with more than a sarcastic aside—except in a crisis. Mundane courtesies eluded him, yet he had stepped up when our sister was dying of cancer and during our mother’s decline.
In 2014, Bill had a cardiopulmonary crisis that precipitated multiple organ failure. He spent six weeks in the hospital and six weeks in a rehab center before he was able to return to his apartment. My brother’s kidneys never recovered, so he was undergoing dialysis three days a week for four hours. My husband and I paid his rent until he was able to qualify for Social Security disability payments. Several weeks after his return home, Bill’s doctor signed off on his ability to drive. Bill had far too little muscle tone to handle his Harley, so we decided to give Bill our second car.
Two years after Bill’s initial hospitalization, I began making notes for a future book, a self-soothing fantasy project with the working title Dorothy Day Never Knew My Brother. Day, a communist who converted to Catholicism, spent most of her life working with the destitute. Dorothy, bless her heart, thought that followers of Christ have no right to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor.[1] In theory, I agreed with her, but I was finding her dictum hard to live by. Grudgingness stalked my every attempt to be openhanded toward Bill. In my fantasy conversations with Day, I made her the following list:
- When Bill was well enough, my husband and I would arrange to treat him to a restaurant dinner when we were in town. He’d choose the place, and we’d meet him there. We’d arrive at the appointed time, and he’d walk out of the restaurant’s bar carrying a half-finished drink. He’d order another as the waitperson gave us our menus and another halfway through the meal. He’d also drink two glasses of water. All told, in those two hours, he would consume more fluid ounces of liquid than a dialysis patient should have in an entire day.
- Bill was convinced he knew more than his health-care providers. He mounted a relentless search for medical workarounds to the self-discipline and lifestyle changes they prescribed as part of his dialysis treatment—workarounds that did not exist.
- After reaching the point in his recovery during which physical activity would be particularly beneficial, Bill pressured his landlord to designate the parking place closest to his apartment a handicapped spot. He got what he wanted but also earned the ire of his apartment manager.
- Bill got a free cat from an ad on Craigslist. Bill named him Little Willy and claimed the cat was a therapy animal, so he wouldn’t have to pay a pet deposit. When the manager expressed incredulity, Bill got his doctor to write him a prescription for the cat. The manager’s irritation escalated.
- When Bill sold his Harley, he did not use the money to buy himself a car so he could return ours, nor did he offer to give us one penny of the proceeds.
- I asked Bill what he wanted for Christmas, hoping to get him something that would be of genuine use or something that would give him real joy. He said he’d like a power recliner. I suggested that he find one he liked and let us know how much it cost. He picked out a recliner that cost twice as much as any chair I had ever owned. I wrote him a check but never used that strategy with him again.
And what would Dorothy Day say back to me, this woman who said, “There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell and they are ungrateful”[2]? It was not hard to guess. Carol, your list—the very fact that you are keeping score—is a two-edged sword. Get the log out of your own eye, girl.
And what would I say back? My petulance tempted me to lengthen the list:
- Each year of our adult lives I have sent Bill a birthday card, as siblings do. His birthday was five days before mine. Receiving my card could have nudged him to send me a card. No card ever came.
I could picture Dorothy shaking her head in disgust. And I knew that disgust was not directed at Bill. She was shaking her head at me.
I was in my early forties when I read Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. I thought it might be useful for a course called Saints, Heroes, and Ordinary People that I developed and taught a dozen times during my decades of college teaching. The Roman Catholic Church had already begun to consider whether to declare Day a saint shortly after her death in 1980, so it seemed fitting.
The course grew out of my interest in the topic of supererogation, a big word for performing actions that go beyond what is morally required. Most people are helpful to a decent degree and refrain from wanton harm. They tend to consider anything beyond that as a kind of moral extra credit. There are puzzles here. Where is the line between minimal decency and heroism or saintliness? How much potential risk or inconvenience gets us off the moral hook?
As a Christian, I was interested in the question of whether any action, no matter the costs, can count as beyond the call of duty in light of what we owe in gratitude to a God who has made the infinite sacrifice of suffering and dying on our behalf. Most non-Christians admire a Day or a Mother Teresa, but few see the example of these women as calling their own lives into question, as arguably we Christians should.
As Bill’s neediness pressed harder against my life, I began wishing I’d never heard of Day, a wish that only intensified after Bill stopped drinking.
Months of suffering the side effects of dialysis had strengthened Bill’s already strong desire to get on the kidney transplant list. Untreated alcoholics don’t get put on the list, and Bill’s doctors would not give up their suspicion that he was one. That made him furious, but he realized arguing with them was getting him nowhere. Denial is, after all, a symptom of alcoholism.
Bill knew that the only way to show that he was not an alcoholic was to quit drinking. But going to a treatment center would be admitting that his doctors were right, so, instead, he set up his own support system. He stopped keeping alcohol in his apartment. He enlisted the help of the bartender at Chan’s who agreed to serve him nothing but water or soft drinks.
Shortly after Bill stopped drinking, he began to dally in little acts of what I suppose one could call supererogation. He allowed a neighbor he hardly knew to sleep at his place because the man’s apartment needed to be treated for toxic mold. Bill got irritated with the guy when he complained that Little Willy was getting into his stuff. They were both relieved when the man went back to his own place. Then Bill bought a gas grill and posted flyers around his building inviting people to build community by coming to a cookout. After that, he started talking about starting a new religion that sounded suspiciously like the plot of the old movie Pay It Forward.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he hoping that someone he provided with a free burger would volunteer to give him a kidney? Was he hedging his bets against some final judgment?
Then, just before midnight, Bill called from an after-hours pet emergency clinic. He needed my credit card number, without which they would not touch Little Willy. Bill was sure that Willy would die without immediate care. The cat was a dependent living being that Bill loved. How could I say no? I ended up paying a vet bill for over two thousand dollars.
Had Willy swallowed some of Bill’s medications? Contracted a disease? I have no idea, because for the next month, Bill was careening between emergency rooms.
One night Bill called while we had guests over. Our friends began to look concerned as I sat for several minutes listening. Bill was talking nonstop—every fourth or fifth word was “symptom,” but the rest was a jumble. I mouthed “Bill” to my husband and left the room. Fifteen minutes later, my husband came to check on me. By then I had pieced together what hospital Bill was calling from. My husband used his cell to call the hospital’s emergency room to find out what was going on. He was told that, yes, Mr. Miller was there in an exam room, but they were finding it impossible to treat him because he wouldn’t get off the phone.
When I persuaded Bill to hand his phone to the doctor, the doctor asked whether Bill had ever had a psychotic break and whether it was likely that he was taking drugs. I said no and asked whether Bill might be suffering from alcohol withdrawal. The doctor neither endorsed nor denied that hypothesis but asked for my permission to give Bill a sedative. After concluding that Bill was experiencing symptoms of hypoxia from his failing heart, they stabilized and discharged him without admitting him to the hospital.
A week later, I got a call from Bill from another emergency room waiting room. He had been at a restaurant with a friend and passed out. He’d regained consciousness quickly, but the friend had driven him to the ER. The ER admissions staff were keeping him in the waiting room. He wanted me to call them and tell them that he needed to be admitted. He was sure that otherwise he was going to die.
They admitted Bill, and I called each day to check on him. On day two, he was under restraint because he’d been lashing out at the nurses and other attendants. On day three, I was able to talk to him: “What happened?” he asked. This time the doctors concluded that Bill’s problem was caused by an interaction between one of his prescriptions and an over-the-counter antihistamine he was taking for hay fever. After he stopped the antihistamine, the psychotic episodes never returned.
Had Bill’s conviction that Little Willy was desperately ill that night in the after-hours clinic been part of Bill’s downward psychological spiral? I’ll never know. What I do know is that Little Willy lived on. And so did Bill.
I never did use Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness in my Saints, Heroes, and Ordinary People course. I decided that Day’s life was too complicated, that my students might find her checkered past and abrasive manner off-putting. I also thought that Day’s life was too extraordinary to fit my course’s theme. I had imagined the three concepts in the course’s title as lenses through which students could envision the lives they hoped to lead. That meant helping them to see that being ordinary didn’t give them an excuse for living a slacker life.
The saintly Catholic I used instead of Day was Thérèse of Lisieux, who considered herself so ordinary she called herself Jesus’s little flower. How could you not love a twenty-three-year-old who says things like, “The sun shines equally both on cedars and on every tiny flower. In just the same way God looks after each soul as if it had no equal”?[3]
To appeal to my male students, I included Flight to Arras, a memoir in which Antione de Saint-Exupéry recounts his experience as a reconnaissance pilot on a deadly yet futile flight over occupied France. I have long loved the book, not for its plot or premise but for its themes and its prose.
I included saintly Protestants by having students read Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, which describes how a church’s network of Bible study groups sheltered Jews during the Nazi occupation of Le Chambon in southern France, how they believed that putting their own lives at risk to save strangers was what any decent person would do. Le Chambon is located on a plateau in southern France, and Hallie uses that as a metaphor for understanding their attitude: when you live on a plateau, you do not notice your altitude—if courage and altruism come naturally to you, you cannot imagine acting differently.
I paired Hallie’s book with a segment from 60 Minutes in which a German Jewish man is interviewed with the daughter of his Protestant neighbors who hid him under the floorboards of their home during the war. The daughter recounts knowing that if her family were caught hiding Jews, she and her brother would have been hung from their balcony—she had seen this happen to others. Toward the end of the interview, the man says that he could not have done what the people who saved him did. Perhaps he could have put himself at risk, but he could not have risked his children. The people who hid him were saints; he was not.
Could I respond to Dorothy Day’s Get the log out of your own eye, girl? by saying, Lady, you were a saint; I am not? Only if I wanted to hear her ask, So you’re saying that as far as you’re concerned, the gospel is moot? As self-soothing fantasies, my conversations with Dorothy were not going well.
During the roughest times with Bill, I thought that my memories of Day, St. Thérèse, Hallie, and de Saint-Exupéry were ganging up on me. In Flight to Arras, de Saint-Exupéry depicts countries and farms as webs woven by the sum of their gifts—each soldier risking his life, each laborer tending a field, being enlivened as their participation strengthens the whole. He might as well have added families to that web and put it in big, bold type. “Fraternity is the creation of sacrifices alone,” he writes, and “To create love, we must begin by sacrifice.”[4] But how much sacrifice?
Sure, brother dear, take my car, my credit card number, my money, and my time. But can I draw the line at my kidney?
It was Ash Wednesday when Bill called to tell me that he’d made it onto Oregon’s kidney transplant list. “They wanted me to set up some Facebook plea for a live donor,” he told me, “but I said to hell with that. I don’t see anyone stepping up to give me a kidney.” Most years, I gave up alcohol for Lent as an annual check-in with myself about my life’s center and circumference. That year, my Lenten exercise was wrestling with whether to give Bill my kidney.
Back when I was teaching Symbolic Logic, I could have set this up as a story problem: For any x who is a recipient and any y who is a live organ donor, (1) x gets to live longer than x would without the transplant; (2) x can stop spending twelve hours a week undergoing dialysis and can thus prevent the debilitating side effects from dialysis; (3) x will need to be on antirejection drugs for the rest of x’s life; and (4) y’s life is likely to go on as it would have after a few months of recovery, but the loss of the kidney may shorten y’s life. QED: There is likely substantial gain for x and modest sacrifice for y.
Put yourself in for y. Would you donate your organ to an x who was a stranger or a casual acquaintance? There are people who have done that. It is not hard to imagine Day donating a kidney to some needy person in one of the shelters where she worked.
Now imagine that y is someone you love dearly. Given what I’ve shared about Bill Miller, what would you say to your loved one if Bill were the x? Would you say, Don’t do it! Why think Bill will take good enough care of your kidney that giving it to him will do him significant good? That’s what I would have said if one of my sons had contemplated donating a kidney to Bill.
But my Lenten question was not an abstract thought experiment about giving a kidney to a stranger or what I would say to one of my sons if Bill asked them to contribute. My Lenten question was intensely personal—was I willing to give my kidney to Bill, to risk my own health to restore his? I could not bear putting our lives on a scale like that. Even posing the question seemed too much like asking whose life was worth more. And I had no illusions that getting a new kidney would turn Bill into a different person. He’d been an uncooperative dialysis patient, and I expected more of the same after a transplant. Yet I felt unable to tell Bill no. I was unwilling to be the kind of person who would tell her brother she valued her own comfort more highly than his life. That seemed too much like the rich man in Luke 16 telling Lazarus to have a nice day while stepping over him on his way to the five-star restaurant.
Weeks passed before someone from the transplant center called me. “We appreciate your willingness to be a donor. It’s wonderful that you want to do that. Unfortunately, your history of high blood pressure disqualifies you,” she said.
That evening, I called Bill. “Well,” he said. We both waited in a long pause that felt like a held breath. “Well,” he began again, “I wouldn’t want a kidney that wasn’t in good shape.” His attempted bravado teared me up.
If I’d been green-lighted all the way through the organ donor process, would I have opted out at some future point? Bill’s hopefulness would have increased as we got closer and closer to the date, and I expect my doubts and apprehension would have increased too. Yanking away Bill’s hope would have been appalling, and I want to believe I would have gone through with the procedure, but I’ll never know.
Neither Bill nor I were transformed by my decision to apply to become his donor. Yet perhaps it changed each of us subtly. “No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us,” says Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “To live is to be slowly born.”[5]
[1] See Day, “Catholic Worker Ideas of Hospitality,” Catholic Worker,May 1, 1940, 10.
[2] Day quoted in Robert Barron, Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic (Sheed and Ward, 2004), 29.
[3] Saint Thérèse, The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. John Beevers (Doubleday, 1957), 20.
[4] de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, trans. Lewis Galantière (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), 148 and 150.
[5] de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 41.