Patch's View
By Susan Larson
"What's wrong with death?" Patch Adams asks a panel of
doctors in the movie of the same name. "Why don't we address life in
terms of quality and not quantity?"
My son, Loren, died in a car accident at the age 16, living a life that
could hardly be memorialized in terms of its quantity. but in quality, his
brief life hardly fell short.
At his funeral service, Evelyn Ellis, the head of an Atlanta street
ministry that our family supports, spoke of Loren's life. She recalled how
he used to love to come over to their house and have lunch with the guys
and walk around downtown with them listening to their stories. Then she
related a story about Loren.
When he was about 8 years old, I had cut off the bottoms of his ragged
sweat pants to make play shorts. We live on a wooded lot with a creek so
our three boys dirtied and wore out lots of clothes in the back yard. I
threw about a dozen leg bottoms with the elasticized ankles into the
wastebasket, and Loren fished them right back out. "Can't we give
these to Evelyn to use as hats for street people?" he asked.
I took them to Evelyn just to humor him, but she said they could indeed
use them for emergency hats in the wintertime, but more importantly, the
recipients would be touched that such a young child would think of trying
to help others.
She concluded her eulogy by saying that to this day, people living on
the streets of Atlanta talk about the little boy who cared about them. At
16, he had left a legacy. At 8, he had a better handle on care,
compassion, and loving charity than most adults do.
In Western society, we seem to like numbers - the bigger the better.
Quantity is what counts the most. Life itself seems like a marathon,
measured and most highly regarded by the number of years it lasts. The one
who lives the longest wins, even if it's in a coma or on life support in a
nursing home.
I wonder if Patch isn't right in wondering about a better way of
addressing life. As we're blessed with different physical features, maybe
we're blessed with different temporal features as well. Some of us may be
short in terms of height while others may be short in terms of time. But
neither the quantity of space our bodies occupy nor the quantity of time
they remain on earth should have and correlation to - or superiority over
- the quality of life we live while we are here.
It's been two and a half years since Loren's death. I continue to
struggle with the quantity of years that he had, but how much sadder I
would be if that were the only aspect of his life that I had to reflect
on.
"What's wrong with death?" As I think of my son and address
this from a quantitative point of view, I still mournfully say,
"Plenty. Especially when it comes so soon." But from a
qualitative angle, I might rather ask - and joyfully answer, "How
rich was his life?"
This article is reprinted from the Summer 2001 issue of "We need
Not Walk Alone". WNNWA is the quarterly publication of The
Compassionate Friends. This has been reprinted with the permission
of the author.
Susan Larson and her husband live in Lilburn, GA. She is a weekly
columnist for the Gwinnett Daily Post and writes for several other monthly
publications. More of her writings can be read at Grand
Larson-e. Their family includes three surviving children
and three grandchildren. Susan's son, Loren, died Thanksgiving eve,
1998, forty days after his 16th birthday. He would have graduated
from high school in May 2001.
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