by Studs Terkel
I was in the hospital for another month. They released me from intensive care and I went into a treatment program for ten days. Honestly, I had no intention of not drinking. It didn’t occur to me that I might be able to do that. I thought, If I’m going to die, I’m going to die. But somehow, the days just began to string together and pretty soon sobriety became a way of life. It’s not like I lived happily ever after. I’ve had more pain and more anguish and more challenges in my life since then than I did before. What I understand them to mean when they said it will never be this bad again is, I’ve never felt that total despair, that real belief that there is nothing and I am lost.
I was not at all spiritual at the time—I was agnostic, I had no belief. Once you start in recovery, you need some concept of a higher power. Nothing worked for me. I tried various churches. After I came out of the hospital, I started getting sober and tried to live that life. And then somebody took me to a Unity service, and it made a whole lot of sense. To think that I was dealing with a power within me greater than I had ever imagined made a whole lot of sense, ’cause something was keeping me sober—it wasn’t me. I had at last found security.
Unity is what would generally be classified as new-thought Christianity.* It places its emphasis on the presence and power of God in every person—that what we are here to do is to release and express that God within us. So our prayer work is more internalized than it is to a God somewhere in the distance. We’re very Bible-based, we’re based in the teachings of Jesus. It’s a very empowering, loving energy.
I had worked for Joe Papp in New York at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Shakespeare in the Park and then down at the Public Theater just when he first opened it. It was a very exciting time. Once I got sober, one of my fears was that the creativity is in the bottle. I think everybody worries about that. I found that wasn’t the case. So I continued in theater, but my life really began to center around recovery. I got very active in AA.
I happen to be gay. I met a lover and lived in Detroit for a while, and then moved to Chicago and worked at Wisdom Bridge Theater. But the spiritual dimension that had opened up in my life became more and more dominant. I just felt this calling—it really was a calling. So, at age forty-four, I went into ministerial school.
I had always felt so totally different, so totally stranger-in-a-strange-land. I’ll tell ya, we gays have given ourselves quite a road . . . I didn’t even admit it to myself. I just was in deep, deep denial. But what would happen is that I would get drunk and then I would act out sexually. Once I stopped drinking and using drugs, I had to come out of the closet because I really had to give myself permission to be who I am, if I was going to survive at all, much less accomplish anything with my life.
I was about seventeen or eighteen years sober by the time I entered the ministry. I was ordained when I was forty-six, so I’m coming up on ten years. I know that there is life after death—I believe that life is continuous. I don’t believe in a hereafter any different than this. I believe that we are spiritual beings and, as spiritual beings, this lifetime is part of a larger continuum. We were somewhere else before and we will go somewhere else afterward. The experience of death and the experience of birth are almost identical: they’re a letting-go of one dimension and moving into another dimension.
Unity has no dogma. I believe in God. Somebody asked Jung, “Do you believe in God?” and Jung said, “I don’t believe, I know.” I know that there’s a dimension to life beyond what we’re experiencing. I believe in reincarnation. It’s not a basic Unity belief, but we just believe that if we are eternal spiritual beings, then eternity doesn’t begin when we die—we are part of eternity now. We must have been somewhere before we were here. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether I was Cleopatra in a past life—that was then and this is now. I do believe that we grow, that we have more than one opportunity to make the choices that will align us with that spiritual energy so that we’re more powerful. Once a woman offered to do a past-life reading on me. I just said, “OK, fine.” She said, “You weren’t on this planet in your last life.” I said, “Lady, I haven’t been on this planet for most of this life! That doesn’t surprise me . . .” I don’t really worry about it too much.
Being a gay minister, I do a lot of work with persons with AIDS, and have done a lot more memorial services than I’d ever care to. That really is the most comforting thing that I can offer, and the most empowering: it’s not that you die and you are judged and you are punished, it’s just that life goes on. The truth of who you are cannot die, and so it will find another way to express itself.
Oh, I’ve been to Hell, done that. One of my metaphysics teachers says that Hell is useless, unnecessary suffering that we put ourselves through. It’s what we do to ourselves by judging. What was the one thing Jesus said more often than anything else? Judge not. Judge not. And what’s the one thing that his followers insist on doing in his name: judging. Exactly what he told them not to do: judging others.
One of the things that makes it possible for me to be a Unity minister is that we don’t have doctrinal opinions. People say, “What is Unity’s stand on abortion?” We don’t have one. We honor the guidance within you and we support that. And that’s why there are so many gays and lesbians in my church, because we don’t judge. We don’t say you should be straight but we’ll love you anyway. We say: Be the best gay you can be, be the most compassionate. That’s what you’re here to do.
As for death . . . I have no question that people have the right to say, “This is enough—I want to go now.” But there’s so much we don’t know. There was a woman I visited recently in a nursing home and she said, “Why is God letting me linger? I want to go. This is expensive—I’m in pain.” And I said, “We have no way of knowing. Your being here may be affecting another life in some significant way. You may have one little thing still to do, one little piece of forgiveness still to accomplish. And if you do it now, you don’t have to come back and live another life to do it again. You can just do it now.” I certainly would never judge them or condemn them.
In some religions, they almost freeze-dry the grief and just keep you in it forever. Of course we’re going to grieve—that’s part of the process. I can’t think of anything more unkind to do to somebody who has just lost a loved one than to say, “Gee, I hope he goes to Heaven.” It’s just . . . a life is completed and that’s to be celebrated and grieved and learned from and we move on. To just make it such an occasion of judgment and finality is too cruel.
The most powerful death experience I’ve ever had—I was a minister by then—I was living in Portland . . . This was my best friend. A brilliant actor, wonderful talent, who died of AIDS at age thirty. He gave me the greatest gift anyone has ever given me. At the end, when he knew that he had very little time and it was affecting his brain, he called me and he said, “I want you to be part of my support team while I go.” I was present in the room with him when he died. To be part of that experience . . . It was definitely scary, definitely frightening, just as birth is frightening—that’s why we scream when we come in, because we’re moving into the unknown, and that’s always scary.
We walk in one door and walk out the other door, and the experience is the same: we’re afraid to move to the next dimension. The womb is a nice safe place to be—but you can’t stay there forever. When I became a minister, my greatest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to handle death, I’d just collapse, I’d just be too moved, be too grief-stricken, I wouldn’t be able to . . . Maybe it’s because of my own death experience, but it’s one of the great gifts I have to offer and one of the richest experiences in my life is to be present when somebody makes a transition. Often this is the role I play with the person who’s dying and knows that he or she is dying while the family is in deep denial. And you show up and they say, “Doesn’t he look better today? And next year on vacation we’re going to go . . .” This poor guy, all he wants to do is talk about what is going on for him. Sometimes I’m th
e only person to whom he can say, “You know, I’m dying. I’d like to talk about what this is going to be like.” Everybody else around him thinks that by refusing to discuss it they are somehow cheering him up. It’s just the opposite: they’re making it so frustrating for him to try and bring some kind of closure that will let him go in peace. The dying man says to me, “I want to tell my wife about the safe deposit box, but every time I do she goes nuts and says, ‘You’re not going to die!’ I know I am, and I’m OK with it. Please, help us communicate . . .” That’s what I do more than anything else, is just bring people together and say, “Let’s talk.”
I’m not eager for death. There’s a lot I want to accomplish here. I’m just starting to get the hang of this now. [Laughs]
*It is not New Age; Unity was founded in the late 1800s.
The Stranger
Rick Rundle
He arrives by bike. He is a forty-five-year-old “hoisting engineer” for the Streets and Sanitation Department; he works in graffiti removal. He lives with his mother and a younger brother, John, who has Down’s syndrome. Just the previous month he had donated part of his liver to John Husar, a columnist on the outdoors for the Chicago Tribune and a member of his parish congregation. Theirs is the only white family in a black community on the south side of the city.*
MY FAMILY WAS always religious, but I think anyone’s faith, it ebbs and flows. For a true seeker of answers, it ebbs and flows. So I can’t say I always had strong faith—I’d be lying. But it’s not the hour you’re in church, it’s all the other hours you’re not in church that truly show who you are.
I went searching for different parishes to get what I needed. The parish that I settled on is Old St. Pat’s, down on the near West Side of downtown Chicago. It’s the oldest public building in the city of Chicago. I had slowly become a Eucharist minister, a liturgical minister, one that does the readings and passes out the bulletins. About three months ago, at the end of the mass, the priest made an announcement that there was a parishioner who was looking for a liver transplant. Five of my close friends have come down with hepatitis C, which is a chronic liver disease—lifelong friends that I’ve known for years. So I was somewhat familiar with liver disease. The odd thing about hepatitis C, it’s pandemic. Probably more people are going to die of hepatitis C this year than will die of HIV in this country. Because it’s a silent disease, it’s a disease that takes fifteen to twenty years to incubate and once it does, it affects different people in different ways. The only known cure, and it’s not even a cure, is a liver transplant.
John Husar wasn’t a friend. I’d see him at church and, of course, I enjoyed reading his column.
I wanted to see him live. I wanted to give him a chance at a life that was being denied him. I knew my friends who had hepatitis C, and it’s not a good existence. It’s a lot of sleeping, it’s a lot of times you don’t even feel good enough to get out of bed. And I met a priest who got the last liver in the previous millennium, 1999. He talked about how much it did for him and how good he felt.
Everything has a purpose. By meeting people, you make an equation and make your own decision. So I met this Carmelite priest, oh, he’s got to be close to seventy or older. And he said to me, he goes, “I don’t know why they decided a person like me should get the liver. They should give it to a person who was thirty years old. But I guess they see that I have a purpose in life, that I can do something with this life of mine.” I saw that without a liver, John Husar had no hope, that he was going to die. There was no ands, ifs, or buts about it.
I felt it didn’t have a risk to it, but the doctors told me it had a big risk to it because there’s a number of complications that could have happened besides me dying on the table. I gave one pint of blood in case they needed it during the operation, which I was told would take six hours. Then the nurses told me the operation would take nine hours. Then it took twelve hours. So it’s a very long, complicated, sophisticated operation. Because of all the bile ducts and arteries and veins going into the liver, because of filtering properties of the liver—it’s a more complicated transplant than the heart or the kidney. What happens is, they take the right lobe of your liver—they take over fifty percent of it. But the unique thing about the liver is, it regenerates itself. The liver you have right now will not be the same liver you have three weeks from now—it’ll totally disintegrate, let’s say—and replace itself within three weeks as long as you’re healthy and there’s no fevers. So my liver is back to full strength, though the scar is still there.
It was about a month ago, but it still feels like somebody whacked me with a paddle or a cane right across my abdominals. As soon as you get out of the hospital they tell you . . . Well, I like to golf: so no golf, no sailing, no strenuous exercise. And, of course, no drinking. So all I’ve been doing is reading, listening to music, and taking naps.
I did it because it would only be a couple months of me not being able to work or do what I want, and this is something I could do in my life. I could give life to someone else, give them hope, give them the chance. I minimized the risk in my mind. For years I used to race a sailboat and not be a good swimmer. I rode a motorcycle for years and was in a lot of close accidents. You take a chance any time you get on a bus or an airplane or a train or a car—so everything is risk. But if you’re not willing to risk, you truly don’t own it, do you? So I thought: It’s my life. You have to risk your life, and especially for someone else, to give life. We’re all part of this human community, and if you’re not willing to give of yourself, then you’re held captive. To me, God is unconditional love. That means to love someone, no matter what they do, how they are, how little you know them, but to help someone with all they have.
I got this belief through years of listening to the sermons at Old St. Pat’s. And also from my mother. She’s eighty-two years old. She went to work for the city in the Health Department, in the Water Department. She met my father in the late forties and had five children; then as my younger brother, John, was old enough to be put in day care, she wanted to go back to work and make money. So then she taught high school for twenty years in the Catholic high school system. So I get a lot of this doing from her.
She believes in people. If she didn’t believe in life, in the dignity of life, whatever life there is, she wouldn’t be that way to my brother, Johnny, who has Down’s syndrome.
Life is sacred. And if you can help someone in a time of need, you would not even think twice about it. It’s what they call a no-brainer. I got it, I don’t need it. You get by with forty percent of your liver. Right now my liver is back to full strength. The right lobe was taken out and now it’s back to a hundred-percent volume.
The surgeon came to me right before they were going to put me under and said, “If you die on the operating table, you’re not going to come back and haunt me?” He says, “If you want to get out, get out now.” He wanted to make sure that I knew the consequences, or the ultimate risk, and that I was doing this of my free will. He wanted to challenge me one more time and tell me that I could get out. I said, “I’ve had a good life these forty-five years. And if I die, I’m at peace with myself. But if I don’t take the risk to help this person, I’ll forever look back at myself and say, ‘Why didn’t I?’ ” So I told him, “I do this of my own free will, I’m at peace, and I wouldn’t haunt you. Don’t worry about me.” This is one thing that I could do and would do and feel good about doing it.
My mother said, “Well, Rick, I think it’s OK because you’re going to do whatever you want anyway. You’ve made up your mind.” It wasn’t until my mother met Laura, who is John Husar’s daughter, that she actually understood what it meant to John’s family. John had been on a transplant list for the last two years and gone to the hospital as a standby, but never got it. Five times he was prepped for an operation. I’ll never forget: we were at a meeting a couple of months before the operation and the doctor looked at him and said, “I give you six weeks on the inside and six months on
the outside. If you don’t get a liver by then, you’ll be dead.” That’s really looking down the barrel of a gun.
I didn’t really make a will. I contacted a lot of people that I thought would be upset, through e-mail and telephone, to let them know that I was doing this and there was a small amount of risk there. A lot of times in life we try to play down our own risk, you know what I mean? More people told me there was a risk than I believed there was. I don’t know if it was my strong faith or my vitality.
Now, from what I learned there’s a ninety- to ninety-five-percent success rate for the recipient. The donor—they’ve only lost I think two, three donors. There’s always complications of bleeding, of bile, and infection. But I didn’t see it coming my way. Of course, I have a scapular on. It’s a thing that was given to St. Simon Stock, who was the head of the Carmelite Order, by the Virgin Mary. Basically, it says whoever wears my scapular will never suffer the flames of Hell.
To me, Heaven is no pain, seeing the people you want, having the questions in your mind answered. People are always nice, they’re always altruistic, you only have rainy days if you want them. You see the people that you haven’t seen that are in the other world. To me, it’d be like a big picnic. Whatever you’re missing in this life, you’re made whole. My brother, who has Down’s syndrome—I would probably not even recognize him. He’d be able to talk and we’d converse more than we would now. Johnny as a whole person—not handicapped, no wheelchairs.