Book Review: Be Not Afraid

(edited for clarity)

Title: Be Not Afraid 

Author: Johann Christoph Arnold

Date: 2002

Publisher: Plough

ISBN: 978-0-87486-189-1

Length: 224 pages

Quote: "And even if we have been successful in warding off plagues that decimated earlier generations, we have no lack of our own–from suicide, abortion, divorce, and addiction, to racism, poverty, violence, and militarism. We live, as Pope John Paul II used to say, in a culture of death. It is also a culture of fear."

We as a culture fear death so much that we try to deny it. Some people don't even want to admit that a loved one has died--person only "passed" or "left us" or some other evasive phrase that is likely to give children morbid fears of the Great Mystery they have heard confused with leaving, passing, or sleeping. Some people not only fail to make any provisions for their own demise, but become agitated when their friends do. Of course, lack of preparation and recognition can make anything worse, and so they do. This book is written to help people deal with their excessive, counterproductive fear. The author tells the stories of many people's last days as a way to help people face the Ultimate Fear with fortitude.

Johann Christoph Arnold is "pro-life" in the ways every Christian must be, and in a few ways that are optional. Not content to mention that medical termination of a doomed pregnancy may merely add expense and danger to a process that is going to end naturally, he feels that the time his family spent trying to make a self-aborted fetus live was a brief contact with a living soul, rather than a futile struggle to deny the reality of a dead one. 

He doesn't seem to have known people for whom there is such a thing as an unwanted pregnancy. For the intended audience for this book, there isn't. 

His optional words on the subject of terminal patients' desire to shorten the process also seem to me to leave something out. My father developed a condition that felt like a chronic toothache, in the absence of teeth. Finding no evidence of an infected root left in a socket, doctors called it neuralgia. Some thought it was bone cancer. Noting other old people with similar symptoms and no evidence of cancer, I wonder whether it was a bone infection, whether the bacteria that cause tooth and gum decay are able to infect jawbones. In any case it hurt; he tried milder painkillers, reacted badly to all of them, but reported some relief from taking Tegretol. Tegretol is a drug more often prescribed for seizures than for pain; its known side effects include an obsession with suicide. Being a self-described Christian agnostic, Dad didn't start raving about any immediate need to end his life, but did start thinking and talking about wanting to keep that option open if he started reacting badly to Tegretol too. The Kevorkian trial was in the news. During his last years Dad became a Kevorkian partisan. That a simple surgical operation, to which he agreed, activated an Irish genetic pattern that caused a fatal stroke a few days later, was sad; it was a misadventure; but in a way it was also a solution.

I was working on the George Peters FacTape series at the time. "I want to do a tape on the right to suicide," said George Peters on one of the tape-letters by which he communicated.

"I don't want to do anything that encourages suicide," I said on my taped reply. "It might be better to talk about ways sick people can be useful and valuable in this world. People are so obsessed these days with treating 'depression' as a disease, which means marketing pills, that they are talking about hereditary tendencies to it. If a grandparent was 'depressed,' they will say, shouldn't the children be talking to psychologists and probably taking pills when they're ten years old? I don't think children need to be using these drugs." (This was before the link between antidepressants and violent insanity had been documented.) "I think children need their grandparents, all four if possible, for as long as God allows them to have grandparents. I think I was better off just having a chance to see all of my grandparents, even if I was too young to remember much about two of them, then my baby sister who only got to meet one grandmother. I've been told that in Cherokee communities a young person's life and education is supposed to involve service to elders, and if the person has no grandparents, other elders will be 'issued'! Maybe we should do a tape about how that works, if it does work. Children need to know a few other adults besides their parents."

"It's all very well for children to know their grandparents while they can," George Peters replied. (He was, of course, as besotted with his own grandchildren as all grandparents are.) "but that is evading the issue. Do children need to see old people being forced to live with unbearable pain?"

I had to agree that they probably don't. Fortunately, perhaps, "partial birth" abortion, done late enough in pregnancy that it really could amount to killing a viable and conscious baby, became a hot topic in the news, and everyone engaged with that topic enough that the series never got into "the right to die." 

The question then arises how we define "unbearable pain." Arnold's circle of acquaintance seems to have included only people whose final illness featured bearable or manageable pain. Most of us do, of course, build up tolerance to the pains we have. High Sensory Perceptivity makes people more aware of lower levels of pain than people without the gene seem to be, but also more able to manage our own pain with techniques like breath control. Yet the cancer wards in large hospitals do contain those miserable souls, dying of bone cancer, who are doped into complete immobility and unconsciousness, who still howl and writhe with pain in their drugged sleep. Maybe that way of leaving this world needs to exist for people like my Professional Bad Neighbor, killing animals just to leave them in the road to make his own nephew a Young Grouch, spraying glyphosate on frozen ground just to make me sick and kill the friendly little animals whose company I enjoy; yes, may he be long remembered as dying the longest, slowest, most horribly painful death anyone ever endured. Child abusers should die slowly, many people feel. Warlords should. Plenty of people wanted to watch Hitler screaming on a morphine drip; some would like to see Putin in that condition now, Nobody wants to let it happen to their own parents. I think, without encouraging or recommending suicide, we should respect patients' decisions about when to stop the treatments, which may be aggravating the pain, and let people go.

I don't want to write, nor do youall want to read, another book to add to Be Not Afraid, so I'll stop now. After discussing abortion and suicide Arnold goes on to consider "normal" deaths, expected and unexpected, by illness and misadventure. Having grown up in a radical Christian community, his experience of people who die without a Blessed Hope of Heaven seems limited to people like a young disabled veteran who, though Christian friends "tried to help" him, committed suicide anyway...He shares the remarkable story of a relative who was prayed for, while ill, and experienced the crisis not so much as a physical struggle with a bacterial infection (which she had) but a spiritual question of how her healing would affect her faith community, and of others who were prayed for and died anyway. 

Arnold is a grandson of Bruderhof founder Eberhard Arnold. The Bruderhof are a radical Christian group, organized later than the other "Peace Churches" but recognizable as a development of that movement. The original Bruderhof was a commune of radical Christians who lived in one house; this expanded to a colony and then to the idea of urban missions, like those run by some Catholic monastic orders, where singles or couples may be posted to different cities or countries  to live in group houses and minister to those in need. 

Not surprisingly for people who feel called to this kind of life, Bruderhof members express concern about the loneliness of sick people. Illness physically limits social activity in many ways, some more obvious than others. Video phones make it so easy to talk to people in quarantine but this new way to increase contact with those people may only bring to light the shallow and unsatisfactory quality a relationship may always have had. Some illnesses leave time for patients to enjoy the distraction of chatter and television; some make patients impatient with chatter and television and make patients aware of their need for solitary prayer. Extroverts, as always, need to be reminded that probably more than half of humankind can at least correct any extrovert tendencies we may have, and strengthen what we have in the way of consciences, by a regular practice of solitude. 

Sometimes people seem to have coincidental or premonitory thoughts before an unexpected death. I've told the story before of how teen activist David Peters said to his sisters, in a casual conversation, something along the lines of "If one of our parents died, they'd be missed, but they are pretty old. If one of you died, people would say, well, you might've died anyway. But if I died, I'd be a martyr"; and so he did, a few weeks later, and so he was. Arnold tells a story of a Christian who died very young, by misadventure, apparently not in the service of any particular cause, but who felt moved to give away her personal belongings shortly before she died. 

Arnold does not directly discuss the problem young people are likely to have with any preparations they may want to make for the unexpected. Other than insurance agents, nobody wants to think about the reality that people still die before age eighty. Responsible young adults think thoughts like "If anything happens to me, what will become of the animals?" and "If my child became an orphan, who would be per guardian?" and "If I can't go out to check on my parents every two or three days, who would check on Dad?" The answer to these questions need to be "Here is what I can and can't do," not "Oh nothing's going to happen to you! You're young, you're healthy--or have you had bad news? Are you feeling depressed?" When I was concerned about who'd be mopping floors and reading mail for Dad, my concern was that I wanted to be with my husband! What is most likely to happen to a responsible young bachelor may be marriage, a job, a scholarship or fellowship; responsible people don't chatter about those things either, and they still need to be prepared. Arnold does, however, encourage planning and preparation. Good for him.

Life is good, we all want to live as long as possible (perhaps even and especially those who try to fend off bad luck by grumbling)--but life is short. Those of us who fear inadvertently summoning The End by mentioning it need Be Not Afraid. It's not as detailed as Billy Graham's book on preparing for death, nor is it as evangelical. It's a gentle book that may prepare them to work through Graham's book, which goes into details about wills, estates, guardians for children or patients, and so on.