Death of a Christian
From Execution Eve, by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Charles Pinckney Luckey of the Middlebury, Conn., Congregational Church was making his usual ministerial rounds, as usual on his motorcycle. Suddenly, rounding a corner, he lost his balance and fell.
He arrived home that mid-October day in 1974, a little bedraggled. But this didn't matter much-- he was always a conspicuously informal dresser, though never affectedly so. In fact, there was no trace of affection in him, which is one reason he was so greatly, and quietly, popular with his congregation.
What vexed Luckey was that he-- a perfect physical specimen at 50, tall and rangy and handsome, with the face of a 30-year-old and the physique of a long-distance runner-- should have lost his balance. So he went to a doctor, suspecting that he had something wrong with his ear canal. The doctor examined him, couldn't find anything, and everyone hoped that whatever it was would go away.
It didn't. Luckey began to lose his vision and, in a few weeks, was losing the motor control on his left side. By December, he was blind. A legion of specialists surveyed his wilting frame, and a name was spoken which squirts ice water among even hardened doctors. It was diagnosed as Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease, and there are few recorded cases of it. Something about a galloping degeneration of the nerve cells. The prognosis for him: up to six months. Cause? Nobody knows.
They took Charles Luckey to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York to "confirm" the diagnosis. It was only there that he yielded to depression, when they poked about and asked him questions, to measure, scientifically, the physical and intellectual deterioration. Before and after the poking, he was obstinately cheerful and affectionate, dictating to his secretary farewell letters to his friends, letters exalted by a curious dignity that had attached to him even as a teen-ager. Then, on the Sunday before Christmas, propped up at the lectern by his 17-year-old son, he preached his last sermon to a congregation racked with pain and admiration.
The crisis came shortly after. He called his secretary and dictated a letter which he sent to a few friends, and which was pronounced by the retired, aged chaplain of Yale University "the most moving credo of the Christian faith written in my lifetime."
"What"-- Charlie dictated-- "does the Christian do when he stands over the abyss of his own death and the doctors have told him that disease is ravaging his brain and that his whole personality may be warped, twisted, changed? Then does the Christian have any right to self-destruction, especially when he knows that the changed personality may bring out some horrible beast in himself? Well, after 48 hours of self-searching and study, it comes to me that ultimately and finally the Christian has to always view lifer as a gift from God, and every precious moment of life was not earned but was given by grace, lovingly bestowed upon him by his Creator, and it is not his to pick up and smash."
And so I find the position of suicide untenable, not because I lack the courage to blow out my brains, but rather because of my deep, abiding faith in the Creator who put the brains there in the first place. And now the result is that I lie here blind on my bed and trust in the sustaining, loving power of that great Creator who knew and loved me before I was fashioned in my mother's womb. But I do not think it is wrong to pray for an early release from this diseased, ravaged carcass.
"Lovingly given," he closed the statement, diffidently, "to my congregation and to my friends if it seems in good taste."
It seems to me in very good taste, and I pass it along, with the word that at least that final prayer was answered. The coma began two weeks later, and on January 20, 1975, he died. There had been no personality change. That, all the dreadful powers of Jakob-Creutzfeldt couldn't do to Charles P. Luckey.
Charles Pinckney Luckey of the Middlebury, Conn., Congregational Church was making his usual ministerial rounds, as usual on his motorcycle. Suddenly, rounding a corner, he lost his balance and fell.
He arrived home that mid-October day in 1974, a little bedraggled. But this didn't matter much-- he was always a conspicuously informal dresser, though never affectedly so. In fact, there was no trace of affection in him, which is one reason he was so greatly, and quietly, popular with his congregation.
What vexed Luckey was that he-- a perfect physical specimen at 50, tall and rangy and handsome, with the face of a 30-year-old and the physique of a long-distance runner-- should have lost his balance. So he went to a doctor, suspecting that he had something wrong with his ear canal. The doctor examined him, couldn't find anything, and everyone hoped that whatever it was would go away.
It didn't. Luckey began to lose his vision and, in a few weeks, was losing the motor control on his left side. By December, he was blind. A legion of specialists surveyed his wilting frame, and a name was spoken which squirts ice water among even hardened doctors. It was diagnosed as Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease, and there are few recorded cases of it. Something about a galloping degeneration of the nerve cells. The prognosis for him: up to six months. Cause? Nobody knows.
They took Charles Luckey to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York to "confirm" the diagnosis. It was only there that he yielded to depression, when they poked about and asked him questions, to measure, scientifically, the physical and intellectual deterioration. Before and after the poking, he was obstinately cheerful and affectionate, dictating to his secretary farewell letters to his friends, letters exalted by a curious dignity that had attached to him even as a teen-ager. Then, on the Sunday before Christmas, propped up at the lectern by his 17-year-old son, he preached his last sermon to a congregation racked with pain and admiration.
The crisis came shortly after. He called his secretary and dictated a letter which he sent to a few friends, and which was pronounced by the retired, aged chaplain of Yale University "the most moving credo of the Christian faith written in my lifetime."
"What"-- Charlie dictated-- "does the Christian do when he stands over the abyss of his own death and the doctors have told him that disease is ravaging his brain and that his whole personality may be warped, twisted, changed? Then does the Christian have any right to self-destruction, especially when he knows that the changed personality may bring out some horrible beast in himself? Well, after 48 hours of self-searching and study, it comes to me that ultimately and finally the Christian has to always view lifer as a gift from God, and every precious moment of life was not earned but was given by grace, lovingly bestowed upon him by his Creator, and it is not his to pick up and smash."
And so I find the position of suicide untenable, not because I lack the courage to blow out my brains, but rather because of my deep, abiding faith in the Creator who put the brains there in the first place. And now the result is that I lie here blind on my bed and trust in the sustaining, loving power of that great Creator who knew and loved me before I was fashioned in my mother's womb. But I do not think it is wrong to pray for an early release from this diseased, ravaged carcass.
"Lovingly given," he closed the statement, diffidently, "to my congregation and to my friends if it seems in good taste."
It seems to me in very good taste, and I pass it along, with the word that at least that final prayer was answered. The coma began two weeks later, and on January 20, 1975, he died. There had been no personality change. That, all the dreadful powers of Jakob-Creutzfeldt couldn't do to Charles P. Luckey.
Labels: Death
posted by My Mall & News at
9:34 AM
0 Comments
