Faith in Color: Race, Death and Dying
Contributor Carole McDonnell’s short stories and essays appear online and in print, in speculative fiction, ethnic, and Christian publications. She lives in New York with her husband, two sons, and their pets. Wind Follower, published this month by Juno Books, is Carole’s first novel. Her voice adds plenty to our discussion, so I welcome Carole and her column Faith in Color to Allaboutrace.com.
The third anniversary of my mother’s death is almost a month away. Time soothes the heart a bit but I still grieve for her. Much of my grief is tainted by anger and rage, and that too – I hope– will pass.
Most white people are unaware of how much racism is involved in death. For a person who is a minority –especially a religious person– the subtle cruelties of racism that surround death and dying are hard for white folks to understand.
In my case, it started when I decided that I would do everything to save my comatose mother. This meant that I was not going to sign the DNR – the “Do not resuscitate” order. The doctors at the hospital and then at the nursing home tried to convince me that it was the best thing to do. But for me, signing the DNR would mean I was allowing the hospital to slack off. I am a pro-lifer. This means that I am against abortions, the death penalty, so-called “brain-death,” cloning, and organ-farming. I’d read so much about the so-called definition of death, “futile care,” “human non-persons,” “imposed death,” “heart-beating donors”, “non-heart-beating donors,” “the newly-dead,” the Uniform Determination of Death Act, and “usefulness or potential happiness and standard of life” that I knew there was no really defined criteria for “accepted medical standards of death.” Besides I wanted my mother. Even if she lived in a wheelchair with half of her memory gone, I still wanted her alive with me. I believe in heaven — but even so, I wanted to keep my mother with me.
As you can see from the above series of quoted catchphrases, encountering death is not easy. The powers-that-be are rationalists who think they know all. They also tend to choose the expedient easy answer. No use telling them about studies or anecdotal incidents where people awake from comas or supposedly brain-dead newborns are coaxed back into life. These guys live by what they see, by medical funding, by arrogance.
Imagine a religious black woman placed in this mess. For the most part, the doctors quietly led me down the suggested path. If I didn’t want to give my mother a particular operation, they suggested it over and over until I gave in. Looking back, I say to myself, “I shouldn’t have allowed them to give her the tracheotomy.” It led to infections and she probably would not have had as many infections if I had allowed her to remain intubated (to breathe through a tube placed in her throat). They asked that I find a good rehabilitation center for her although she had barely gotten well. I immediately went to work and found one. As soon as I gave them the information, they released her. I should have dawdled which would have made her stay in the hospital a little longer. But that’s how doctors and hospitals work. (My mother had been a registered nurse all her life and had told me more than I cared to know about the slickness of doctors and hospital staffs, but it was only after she was released to the nursing home that I realized how much those doctors had played me.) That was when I began to wonder how many black folks –young and old– had been allowed to die because white folks didn’t consider black lives important, or because white folks needed their organs. Call me cynical but my research into the eugenics/racism/KKK background of Margaret Sanger only makes me very suspicious about Planned Parenthood (her organization) and white folks dabbling with black life. Like Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King, and his late daughter, I consider this kind of thing to be nothing more than genocide against black folks.
It soon became apparent that there was a war against me. It didn’t help that they would open the door of my mother’s hospital room and find me praying for my mother. The head nurse – whose sweet smile had seduced me into believing she actually had a heart — said to me one day out of the blue, “You can dance and sing and pray all day and all night for all I care.” This was her response when I said I was hoping my mother would live. This is the kind of venomous stuff atheists and racists usually toss out at religious people or black people they are annoyed with, but I had not expected it in a medical setting. Pretty stupid of me because so many doctors are simply too rationalistic to allow for miracles. Unless, of course, those miracles involved taking the organs of someone they had rushed toward heaven. I swear! Between the talk of DNR and the talk of needing organs, I almost felt like an evil human being who so selfishly loved her mother she couldn’t see the good other folks could get from her mother’s death.
The worst people to deal with however were the people at the nursing home facility. Unlike the hospital they were determined to get their Medicare money. And in order to do that, I had to give them my mother’s medicaid/medicare records. But the one thing they needed was for me to sign the DNR. They hounded me day and night. They grabbed me every time I visited, which was daily. They had meetings in which they surrounded me with everyone on the staff and pressured me with guilt.
The day came when my mother died. You can imagine how hard I cried. Grief for her was interwoven with anger at the cruelty, racism, arrogance, and greed that had surrounded me. But the final indignity was still to come. My mother had died of emphysema and a stroke. New York’s Mt Sinai hospital was the hospital where my mother had been treated but Ma had died in the local hospital — the one closest to both the nursing home and to my house. The doctors at Mt Sinai had said my mother died because her doctor of so many years was giving her a medicine for her asthma that was “three generations back.” No one used it anymore. They said we should sue. I did not sue. Instead, my sister went to the doctor’s office and told him that he should realize that he was getting old and perhaps he should not prescribe anymore medicines, especially since he wasn’t really keeping up with the research.
When the death certificate arrived, the hospital had written as her cause of death “Smoking.” And they had listed her education level as high school. I called the hospital up and demanded the doctor call me and apologize. I also demanded they send to Albany and revise the death certificate.
“How,” I asked the doctor, “did you come up with smoking as a cause of death when my mother had never smoked. Did you do an autopsy?”
“No,” he said, “but that’s typical. People who die of emphysema and stroke usually are smokers.”
I held my temper. “And why,” I asked, “do you think that my seventy-one year old mother only had a high school diploma? Another assumption? That’s racist, you know.”
“I’m black,” he said, defending himself. “I’m not racist.”
Oh really? Perhaps. But as far as I was concerned, wealth, education, and “secular rationality” had caused this guy to lose his black identity a long time ago.
They say the dying often give us something as they pass on to the next world. What the circumstances around my mother’s death gave me was a profound suspicion of the medical world, something we black folks should always be mindful of.
For more information on bioethics, check out these websites:
