The Draft

Somewhere around here, probably within 25 miles of the shop where this pink paper was put together, a 37-yearold woman with a swollen breast, three children and a recent divorce has just learned she's going to die.

She holds a steady job, but one she never complained about when the boss stopped providing health insurance, because she couldn't afford to lose it.

Breast cancer. She waited too long to see a doctor, in this case Dr. Mary Kay Peterson at Radiology Regional Center, who told me this story last week shortly after the woman finally came in for help. And now she can't be saved.

The woman probably ignored her swelling breast because she assumed she couldn't afford a doctor or a mammogram without insurance. (This assumption turns out to be untrue, I'm told by Dr. Peterson and Miriam Ross, the executive director of Susan G. Komen for the Cure in the five counties of Southwest Florida.)

As a newly single mother, she likely decided to fall back on a grab bag of celebrated virtues to get her through the problem: courage, stoicism, endurance, a willingness to sacrifice herself, and determination. All applied in the hope that she could outlast the growing discomfort until it resolved itself.

Why? Because she loves her children, and perhaps she's proud.

Nevertheless, her decision to wait proved wrong. It alters history — hers, her children's, Dr. Peterson's. Yours and mine, since now you're reading this and I wrote it.

Now, all of us are part of it.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

I had been about to claim that Dr. Peterson isn't afraid to look the truth in the eye. When I bluntly asked her what the outcome for this patient would be, she paused. And then she bluntly told me.

The good doctor wields both heartfelt compassion and cool-headed medical skill at the same time, which is her reputation across the board. That's no easy trick when you care deeply about somebody you can't save. And as you'll see, if you read the main story in this issue, Dr. Peterson is not afraid of telling it like it is.

But for me to claim that she isn't afraid to look the truth in the eye would be selling the truth short.

This young woman is going to die, and her children will have to grow up and grow old without their mother. That's the fact, now. No one can alter it, and Dr. Peterson isn't going to be bullied into happy-speak by it.

But the truth is something larger. The truth lies, somehow, in the answer to the question I posed above: What are we going to do about it?

Now, all of us are involved. The truth of this woman's life, and in part the lives of her heartbroken children, will be defined ultimately by all of us who live here in the world, and here in Southwest Florida, with her.

By knowing about suffering, about tragedy, about need or despair, we become part of its history, whether we asked for that privilege or not. That's a principle — a law, if you will — that works in any culture and in any time. Let me call it The Draft (a heart draft rather than a military draft), and point out that you and I have now been drafted.

Some people ignore the draft, and some don't. Those who don't populate the pages of this issue. They have courage and compassion in abundance. They have intelligence and determination. Some are "believers," some aren't. Some are "survivors," and some haven't had to be. Some are romantics, some are pragmatists, some are relatives and some are strangers. Because of such people, here and now, or in any generation, we manage to hold to the center, to have community and communion. We manage to get by.

And we hope to give our children enough love to live on, and to get by themselves. That mother's children, by the way, are now ours, by order of the draft.

I won't presume to tell you what to do about the young mother Dr. Peterson described, or people like her — I don't know what I'm going to do myself, yet.

Instead, let me tell you one true story about the draft.

Cynthia Mott (page A8) did not burn her proverbial draft card when her friend, Cynthia Snuffin, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She stood by her.

In the last days of Ms. Snuffin's life she clung fiercely to her religious faith and refused to give up the hope that she would be saved in this world, Ms. Mott told me. Her pastor and his wife encouraged that view, and told her in a final hospital visit that they believed she would live. Ms. Snuffin refused to entertain any other discussion or scenario, certainly not hospice care — and she also refused a private offer of illegal pain medication that might have alleviated nausea and mouth sores, among other problems.

"She told this guy NO to pot because her 'testimony' was more important than physical relief," Ms. Mott recalled.

"I begged her to let him try to help her (if not for herself then for the rest of us watching her suffer) but she refused. I'm not saying she was right, wrong, heroic or otherwise, just that she was true to herself and her values all the way through. And she was proud of it, and we're proud of her for it. And maybe that's something others can do, too — a measure of self-defined dignity in the midst of the most undignified circumstances — be true to yourself."

Maybe the courage and faith it takes to do that — to be true to yourself, like Cynthia Snuffin, or true to your friends and neighbors, like Cynthia Mott — provides the gift embedded in the trauma and tragedy.

Cynthia Snuffin was not given to live. But she was given love. So was Cynthia Mott.

I hope that much, at least — both for the young mother who found Dr. Peterson too late, and whose time is now short, and for her three children.