Alfie Evans, rest in peace!
April 28, 2018
Alfie Evans, the seriously ill toddler who whose plight moved thousands across the world, died in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Tom Evans, Alfie’s father, said in a Facebook post: “My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings at 02:30…absolutely heartbroken. I love you my guy.”
Alfie was 23 months old and was in what doctors described as a “semi-vegetative state” due to an undiagnosed neurological condition.
Italy had granted Alfie Evans citizenship in the hope he could be transferred to the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome, but UK courts refused, saying a transfer would not be in Alfie’s best interests.
Alder Hey hospital, which had been treating Alfie, removed his ventilator earlier this week against the wishes of Alfie’s parents but with court approval.
He was expected only to survive a few minutes, but lasted five days without ventilation.
Rallies and vigils in support of Alfie took place across the world, and Pope Francis expressed his strong support for the parents.
Volumes can be written and will be about this 'case' and a few other cases similar to it which expose the total moral rot at the heart of Western civilization. It is good to know that enough people still have their values in place to have come out openly and pro-actively in Alfie's behalf as they did for Charlie Gard before him. From such acorns, the oak of morality - which is really elementary fear of God in the Catholic sense - will not pass into extinction as it has already done in the governments and bureaucracies of the West.
Five days ago, Aldo Maria Valli started a blog post on Alfie Evans this way:
“It is 9:30 in the evening of April 23 as I write these notes. I have just come back from Manoppello where, with my wife Serena and Suor Blandina Paschalis Schlomer, I prayed in front of the Holy Face. For Alfie, and for all children. And that life would triumph over a culture of death. And while I prayed, England was celebrating the birth of the third royal baby in the direct line of succession to the British throne, while on the other, frenetic and dramatic hours passed for those following the fate of Alfie and his young parents, Tom and Kate….”
That was the day Valli like many others experienced a flare of hope because Italy had made Alfie a citizen so it would have the right to claim the toddler for its own and bring him to Italy where two world-class pediatric hospitals were eager to welcome him. To no avail, unfortunately.
The visit and prayer at the Shrine of the Holy Face in Manoppello is a measure of Valli’s strong sense of personal involvement in this case. His one previous post about it on April 22 was an appeal to the pope to sign a decree making Alfie a Vatican citizen so that he could then intervene directly in his behalf, arguing that the pope could do this entirely on his own, without consulting anyone, whereas granting Alfie Italian citizenship would be a far more difficult and bureaucratic process. (It didn’t as it turns out, even if Alfie’s new Italian citizenship failed to move anything in his favor. Meanwhile, a couple of other Italian sites had been advocating something more radical to put teeth to Bergoglio's public statements so far about Alfie (learning from the Charlie Gard experience, he has been more forthcoming this time to the point that many media writers are crediting him for the Italian government initiatives in behalf of Alfie) - for the pope himself to go to Liverpool and the Alder Hey hospital to take little Alfie back to Rome with him, the way he took back three Muslim migrant families from Lesbos two years ago.)
After April 23, Valli wrote five more posts on Alfie – an imaginary dialog with G.K. Chesterton, two on recent revelations about the behind-the-scenes horrors that appear to be common at the Alder Hey Hospital, one an imaginary dialog with Screwtape, and the following eulogy.
My dear Alfie…
Translated from
April 28, 2018
… I write to you as grandfather. An Italian grandfather who has followed your story minute by minute, and had feared for you and with you. Last night, while your guardian angel was accompanying your soul to heaven, I woke up and could not go back to sleep again. Shortly afterwards came the news that you had left us. We grandparents often do not see or feel well but we do have a sixth sense.
I do not know exactly what pathology you were suffering from. I do know that some persons, speaking paradoxically of your ‘best interests’, did wish to accelerate your death, blocking a series of initiatives that perhaps might have saved you, or at least, have helped you to face your affliction better.
But they robbed you of hope, as they did your most brave parents Thomas and Kate, who were denied the right to decide on what to do with you as if they were just two strangers who had nothing to do with you at all. And I ask myself: Why have some persons (doctors and judges) behaved as they did with you?
It seems to me they treated you as nothing more than a nuisance, an encumberment – not as a little human being to be taken care of with the greatest tenderness and care, but as a problem to be removed as quickly as possible. Which is a very grave sin.
I am not an expert in juridical systems, so I cannot say if the criteria adopted in your country, Great Britain, are better or worse than ours. In any case, in all of this, I have seen a lack of humanity which has left me in dismay.
I know that the word humanity may seem rather generic, but right now I can think of no better word. I refer to the capacity to look another person in the eye, to recognize him as brother, to see myself in him. It is compassion in the literal sense – a suffering together, a participation in my brother’s suffering.
And in this story, there has been a great lack of humanity. Unfortunately, I have heard empty and ambiguous words from men of the Church, which has added to my suffering.
Dear Alfie, now you can finally recover fully in the arms of the Lord. But do not forget us. Interceed for all of us, even for those who did not wish you well. Rather, especially for them. Help us to be better persons. To use the gifts of God more wisely.
Some persons, angered at the way you were treated, lost control to the point of saying “God curse the English”. That was said of us Italians, for quite different reasons, and now, here we go again. Pardon these excesses. Obviously, it is not about nationality. It is a question of being good or not, of being generous or not, of loving or not. Help us to improve ourselves.
You have helped us a lot because you have made us ask ourselves what really counts. Indeed, in following your story, many among us made room once again for God and for prayer. For which we can never thank you enough.
And we thank your dad Thomas and your mother Kate, your very young parents, who have given us a lesson in love. They gave everything of themselves, tirelessly and unsparingly. Despite the gigantic obstacles they had to face, they left nothing for granted. They never left your side, and in them we saw a reflection of the love our Father has for us, the father who will never abandon us.
In many photos, I see you wearing the blue sweater of Everton
[an English soccer team], whose motto is
Nil satis nisi optimum – only the best is good enough. Unfortunately in your case, many gave not the best but the worst of themselves. But so many others, starting with Thomas and Kate, were attentive and caring, generous, full of charity – which is a reason for hope that no one can take away.
I have learned that perhaps, precisely in response to your story, the law may change in your country to give more weight to the right and duty of parents to decide on the fate of their children. We shall see. If it happens, then we will have another reason to thank you.
Since I imagine that you must now be playing with Charlie, Isaiah and so so many other children forced to lose their lives early, I shall not bore you further. As a longstanding fan of British soccer, allow me to add one more thing: Many people today sang ‘You’ll never walk alone’ in your honor in front of the hospital. But that is the hymn of the Liverpool team, not of Everton. The Toffees sing “We are the pride of Merseyside”.
Then let me say that you were – and are – the pride not just of Merseyside county, but of millions and millions of people in every part of the world. Yes, we are very proud of you, my dear Alfie.
Ross Doutha brings a wider perspective to the Evans story...
Alfie Evans and the experts
April 28, 2018
Some magazine stories are fishhooks; they work their way into your mind and don’t come out. Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker has written several such pieces in the last year, including one about an African-American mother’s battle to keep her brain-damaged daughter alive after the girl was declared clinically dead, and another about the way court-appointed legal guardians in Nevada exploit the elderly placed into their care.
I’ve been thinking about both stories while watching the drama of Alfie Evans, an English almost-2-year-old with a devastating brain condition whose parents were denied the chance to move him to another hospital or country by a decree from doctors and judges that the time had come for him to die.
It is the second such case in the United Kingdom recently, and the basic facts are roughly similar to the last one, in which a baby named Charlie Gard died of a rare genetic condition after the courts similarly ruled against his parents’ desire to take him abroad for an experimental treatment.
In each case, the doctors and judges had plausible medical arguments that the limits of treatment had been reached. (Although in the case of Evans, their expertise was undercut by the boy’s refusal to swiftly die, as predicted, when his breathing apparatus was removed; he lived for five days before expiring.)
But in each case that judgment was deployed for wicked ends, stripping parents who were not unfit of their ability to act as parents, denying them the ability to choose not only last-ditch treatments but even where and how their ailing children died.
It is easy see the relevance here of Aviv’s story about Jahi McMath, a teenager from Oakland declared brain-dead after a horribly-botched tonsillectomy, whose family managed to spirit her away to New Jersey, where religious-freedom laws allow families to reject a “brain-death” ruling and keep a loved one on a feeding tube indefinitely.
Since then Jahi has survived for years despite confident medical predictions to the contrary, and she now gives pretty decent evidence of retaining some form of consciousness, some ability to listen and respond. In California her status as a dead person is under litigation; in a small apartment in New Jersey, in the care of her mother, she is very much alive.
Her fate is thus
a case study in why a decent society allows families leeway to defy medical consensus: not only for the sake of parental rights and religious beliefs, not only because biases around race and class and faith creep into medical decision-making, but also because in hard cases the official medical consensus often doesn’t come close to grasping all the possibilities, and letting people go their own way is often the only way to discover where it’s wrong.
But this tendency to arrogate power away from the family is not just an issue for extreme medical cases. In Aviv’s story on guardianship among the elderly, it plays out in a more prosaic and yet similarly shocking form — with
old people who are hardly incompetent handed over to professional guardians who sell their assets and consign them to assisted living facilities from which they can’t escape.
The basic dynamic is like the Gard and Evans and McMath cases but with the generational roles reversed:
Instead of parents trying to pry their children away from the medical establishment, you have adult children unable to bring their parents home because their state-appointed guardians say no.
Aviv focuses on the Kafkaesque odyssey of Julie Belshe, a mother of three who spent years extracting her parents from the talons of a woman, April Parks, who was later indicted on charges of perjury and theft. But Parks flourished in
a larger system designed around the assumption that old people are basically better off without their kids, because offspring are probably motivated either by raw emotionalism or by gimme-gimme avarice, as opposed to the cool wisdom of expert doctors, professional guardians, and wise judges.
Such a system is custom-built for the coming world of post-familialism, the world bequeathed to us by sexual individualism and thinning family trees. Just as more and more children are growing up without the active fathers who fought for Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans or the extended kinship network that saved Jahi McMath, more and more people will face old age without sons and daughters to care for them or to challenge the medical-judicial complex’s will.
It is the tragedy of our future that for many people there will be no exit from that complex, no alternative means of receiving care. But it is the task of our present to ensure that where the family still has the capacity to choose for an aging parent or a dying child, the family rather than the system gets to make the choice.
Yes, that choice may be wrong; it may have its own dark or foolish motivations. But those are risks a humane society has to take, so that in our weakest moments we can hope to be surrounded not just by knowledge or power, but by love.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/04/2018 14:37]