The dignity of dependence

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Advances in medicine have helped many Americans live longer than previous generations could have imagined. But longer life often brings with it challenges we do not like to talk about. 

WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney considers one of them—and what faith has to say about it.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: My mother used to say that when it was her turn to go, she didn’t want to linger. 

She had done some adult caregiving in her later years and listened to the querulous complaints about relatives and bathroom issues, and didn’t want to be like that. Her prayer was: “Don’t let me be a burden.”

As she was sinking under some neurological failure that was never defined, hospice entered the picture. My sisters and I organized our schedule for one of us to be with her at all times, and we were prepared for months of rotation. 

But we didn’t get months. I think Mama just stopped fighting, and died within a couple weeks after coming home from the hospital.

If I had my choice, that’s how I’d like to go: passing away peacefully after a short illness, surrounded by family who were not so exhausted by caregiving they were halfway relieved.

But what if the Lord intends, for some inscrutable reason, that I should become a so-called “burden”? 

“That’s my worst nightmare,” you might be thinking. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare. And, as I heard a doctor say recently, it’s the nightmare almost everyone should expect. 

Our modern miracle medicine age has firewalled many of the conditions that used to finish us off in our fifties and sixties, but it hasn’t yet figured out how to replace deteriorating cartilage or bones or energy levels. 

The longer we live, the more body parts are going to quietly and resolutely break down.

In her book The Dignity of Dependence, Leah Libresco Sergeant examines how our modern American system isn’t set up for human vulnerability. Instead, it sets up an idol of autonomy. Autonomy is part of the American ideal, after all: to be free to make your own choices…with certain limitations. 

In earlier decades, when the medical field wasn’t so advanced nor the safety net so expansive, human vulnerability landed in the average American’s lap several times during a life span, whether Aunt Maisie’s chronic illness, Grandpa’s stroke, or sister’s rheumatic heart.

Today, these situations are often out of sight. Dependence is seen as a problem to be avoided at all costs—rather than, as Leah Sergeant reminds us, the very definition of life. 

Full autonomy is a myth. All humans are dependent. 

Even in robust health, we’re dependent on food distribution and the energy grid and highway maintenance. All humans are a burden: at the beginning of life, and at the end, and often in between. 

But we’re also made to be burden-bearers.

Sergeant advocates what she calls a “reality-based system” that aids caregiving rather than stigmatizing or restricting it. But more than that, we need a heart change, starting with our own attitude about dependence. 

If God wills that I be a burden to my son or daughter, let me be a gracious one. If God decides that this is how I glorify Him in death, let Him have my full cooperation. 

It may sound morbid, but these are things we need to be thinking and praying about, all the more as we look toward the end.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.