When It's Time To Let Go (Or, That Rose DeWitt Bukater Was One Smart Cookie)

Several years ago, I made the decision to end a friendship. It had been a close friendship that meant a lot to me at one time.  In fact, when I ended it, it still meant a lot to me.  Letting go of that friendship was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made.  And it wasn't a throwing away. It was truly a letting go, the same way that, in the movie Titanic, Rose lets go of Jack when she realizes that he is beyond saving.

The friendship was beyond saving.

Whatever it was that had brought us together as friends, the thing that continued to bind us had become unhealthy and unwieldy.  There were unkind words spoken and boundaries broken, on both sides, that had slowly eroded the foundation of the friendship.  The final blow was, I'll confess, my doing.  I had suffered a loss - a death in the close family - and this loss had caused my ordinarily temperamental and difficult family to be even more so.  After months of caring for a very ill old man, all of us were frayed and damaged and just plain exhausted.  We had no patience for each other.

There were a handful of friends who picked me up during that time and carried me through that very difficult time by being loving and supportive, by handing me some really useful advice, based on their own recent losses, and by just plain telling me they loved me and, no matter when I called, they would pick up the phone.

And they did.

But she - this friend I released - wasn't one of them.  Instead, she said some harsh things to me that hurt badly, and then when asked to apologize, simply couldn't bring herself to do it. Our final, sad email exchanges sit in a folder in my Outlook - me asking for an unqualified "I'm sorry", and her saying, "Well, I am sorry you misunderstood," or "Well, I'm sorry, but here are all the things you've done to me."  I didn't want to hear that right then. My old man was dead, my heart was broken, my spirit was depleted, and what I wanted to hear was, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. What can I do to help you now?" If I had heard that, all would have been forgiven and the slate would have been cleaned.

When I compared her treatment of me over the past couple of years with that of my other friends, I realized I had a choice to make. A hard choice. I could go on in a friendship that took more energy than I had at that time, that occasionally resulted in emotional and psychological bumps and bruises, and that somehow didn't seem to serve either of us anymore, since she seemed unhappy and dissatisfied as well. Or I could just find a way to walk away.  When I put the choices about this friendship into my mental centrifuge, trying to separate the useless product from what really mattered, I kept coming up with the same results.

Love shouldn't hurt.

This love did. So I did what I needed to do, and said "good-bye".  It was hard. As she got smaller and smaller in my life, more and more distant, I wanted to reach out and scream, "No, come back!" I knew I would miss her.  I would miss the inside jokes. I would miss the movie dates and brunches and birthdays.  I would miss hearing her voice and her laugh.  She was a good friend, whom I'd loved dearly, whom I still love in some small way.

Yet when I said goodbye, when I let the frozen hands of that friendship slip slowly into the metaphorical Atlantic and then turned my attention to saving my own life, as Rose did, I realized that there was a lot more out there for me. My life became a little less chaotic, a little less painful. I missed our good times, but those had become fewer and fewer.  I had thought at one time I'd never be able to survive without her in my life.  In fact, I believe she said nearly these exact words to me.  I did survive, though. I thrived, in fact.

This experience was an invaluable lesson to me. Sometimes, friendships are like Volvos. Sometimes, they're like Yugos.  Ours was somewhere in between - maybe a Ford Fiesta.  But what I learned was that when it's time to get out of that vehicle and into something that better suits my life, I don't have to hesitate.

I don't do that anymore. When the car breaks down, and can't be reliably repaired, I have the right to go. I was reminded this past week that it's all about boundaries.  And sometimes it's about self-salvation.  I can pull those frozen fingers away from my hands and free myself.

Life is short, and I have a lifeboat to catch.

Playing God

Today, we are Catharine, Science Geek. Because I am fascinated by all things medical and scientific, even if they are far beyond what I can comprehend.  The news of the hour is Alana, a pretty New Jersey teenager who has three biological parents.  Yep.  You heard that right. Three. Biological. Parents.

In 1990, Alana's mother was having trouble conceiving a baby. After several attempts at fertilization, doctors theorized that Alana's mother might have a flaw in her mitochondria (the DNA that comes through the maternal line).  They performed a brand new procedure called cytoplasmic transfer, whereby they took one of Alana's mother's eggs, excised the portion of the egg containing the mitochondria, and replaced it with mitochondria from a donor egg.  The resultant hybrid egg was fertilized with sperm from Alana's father, the ovum was implanted in Alana's mother and, presto-chango, nine months later, a pretty, fresh-faced baby, containing genetic material from Alana's mother and father, and the donor female, was born. Fourteen years later, here we are, and here she is:

Shut up, how cute is she? And the only thing unusual about her is that she might confound a DNA test because she has one extra donor to her strand repertoire.

The reason this is of interest now is that the UK is considering fully legalizing the procedure in order to avoid certain diseases of the mitochondria which, though rare, are very debilitating.  The US, however, has already effectively banned the procedure by shuffling it under the auspices of the Food and Drug Administration - which is somewhat perplexing, as it is neither a food nor a drug. The same FDA which has no trouble feeding us mutant corn, is apparently worried that gene replacement therapy will create vast armies of mutant hybrid children who are bent on world domination and can't be killed because of their superhuman physiques and their incomprensible paranormal abilities!

No human cytoplasmic transfers have been attempted in the US since the FDA took it over.

The FDA has said outright that they are concerned that such procedures are tantamount to doctors "playing God" with people's lives.  I'm always amazed when I read about certain medical treatments which have been banned - not because they are not effective, or have been determined to be dangerous - but because we don't want our doctors "playing God".

What in the name of Hippocrates and all that's holy do people think medicine is, anyway? Newsflash, my darling little Neanderthals - the practice of all medicine is, in fact, "playing God". When the mundane world would have you get sick and die from a bacterial infection, your doctor prescribes antibiotics, thereby... "playing God".

When your appendix threatens to burst and cause a potentially fatal case of peritonitis throughout your lower abdomen, the surgeon plays God by cutting you open and removing the offending organ (thereby thwarting pesky Nature and her plans to see you dead and buried once and for all).  I myself was the "victim" of such a God-playing ego maniacal mad scientist, when my unborn child decided that she didn't care what the cool kids were doing, she was coming out butt first.  Her refusal to turn onto her head as her due date approached, coupled with a spike in blood pressure on my part toward the end of the pregnancy, might have been a fatal combination, if my doctor hadn't played God and scheduled a Cesarean section.

Midwives, dentists, chiropractors... all of them are playing God in one way or another by stepping in when Nature is trying to insist on taking it's course, and intervening to save lives and end suffering. Otherwise, doctors and nurses would be standing over your sick bed and praying over you when you got sick, waiting for God to step up to the plate and get the job done. There's a name for that, by the way... Christian Science.

You can't have it both ways.

Either we permit medicine to make some headway on horrendous diseases that can only be cured with stem cell research and gene therapy, like Tay Sachs and cystic fibrosis, and help solve fertility issues and genetic problems by using methods like cytoplasmic transfer, or we stop taking antibiotics and prohibit our children from doing so when they get sick.

(Oh, and... good luck when little Timmy turns up with his first back-to-school ear infection, by the way. Sorry we couldn't play God to save him. Did I mention kids used to die on a regular basis because of ear infections before doctors "played God" by inventing penicillin? No? Oh, well.... We never liked little Timmy much anyway. Always whining about his pus-filled ears. So annoying.)