Brenda Cromartie was crying; her face was shiny with tears. Such a lovely face, thought Father Joseph McPhee, such a shame. “Go on, my child.”
Brenda sobbed openly, sucking in great gulps of air as she tried to get it all out, every last bit. There wasn’t much time left, she knew, this was her very last chance. “It’s all so complicated, Father...I just can’t...it’s just that...”
“It’s alright, my dear,” McPhee said in his best soothing tone and rubbed the palm of his right hand lightly over Brenda’s left cheek. “Just relax and settle down, child, it won’t take much longer now.”
“I know, I know...” Brenda said and licked a salty tear from the corner of her mouth. “I just know that I’m doing the right thing, Father. There’s nothing left for me, no reason to go on now. Just, please Father, tell me that this is the only way...”
McPhee looked long and hard into the young woman’s face and saw how utterly pale she was getting. When this part had started just minutes ago, that face had been pink and full of life. Now it seemed ghostly pale, like a shell of what was there only moments ago. He felt his chest tighten and his throat go dry as he mustered up the nerve to tell another lie. Telling lies to frightened and despairing men and women seemed to come easy to him these days...but they were starting to wear on his soul.
“You are doing the right thing, Brenda,” McPhee said and clutched the small black bible tighter in his left hand. The cool plastic of the rosary beads felt good as they dangled against his wrist, soothing some of the heat he could feel coursing throughout his entire body. His gaze remained locked on to her eyes, so blue, so fearful...she was going to die, they all knew that, and in a matter of moments, most likely. It was his one and only job to make sure that she entered the afterlife with calm and serenity.
“But doing it...this way, Father...are you sure about, about, what you said before?”
McPhee fought back the tears that threatened to boil over just then and tore his eyes from the young girl’s face. Doctor Warner looked over momentarily, his cold eyes emotionless from behind his surgical mask, and nodded once. “Soon, Father,” he said in a monotone voice and went back to what he was doing less than two feet away. The harsh white lights overhead glinted off the scalpel for one brief instant and reminded McPhee of the light that so many who claimed to witness the afterlife swore they were drawn to during those few brief moments of ‘death.’
“I am absolutely positive, Brenda,” McPhee said and once again wiped tears from the girl’s cheek. She couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, McPhee noted, and felt the cold wetness of tears welling up in his eyes once more. “God praises you for what you are doing today, helping others with such a special gift, a gift that most people do not have the...heart...to give. Dear Child, believe me when I say that God grants the most holiest of pardons for what you have chosen to do this day in lieu of the gifts your act will bestow on others less fortunate than you were in life.”
“Oh, thank you, Father McPhee,” Brenda exclaimed with one of her very last breaths. Tears were rolling uncontrollably down her beautiful face now, but a smile appeared on her lips. It was the first time since he had begun her counseling session almost two hours ago that this girl had smiled. It was a beautiful smile, a smile of victory and confidence. A smile that made Father Joseph McPhee forget all about holding back his tears.
He grabbed the girl’s hands then and felt how dreadfully cold they were. His tears rolled off his cheeks and on to her face and mouth as he leaned in close and kissed the girl lightly on the cheek. “You are a great person, Brenda Cromartie, and God will greet you at the gates of heaven personally to thank you for what you have done today.”
“Even though...even though...it was this way?”
“Yes, Brenda,” McPhee said and held her hands tighter now that he felt their grip loosening within his. “Even with the way you have chosen, your actions will give others life and you will be praised in heaven for your ultimate charity.”
“Thank...you...Father...” Cromartie said through barely parted lips. McPhee could see her eyes go glassy and noticed that her skin was now impossibly white. He looked over toward Doctor Warner and saw the bloody pans full of organs, the clear plastic bags full of deep red blood and the bloody plastic gloves on the doctor’s hands. He felt his innards squirm within his bowels and looked once more into Brenda Cromartie’s eyes. “My dear child,” he cried as he watched the last few seconds of the young girl’s life drain out of her and into one of the few tubes still poking from her left arm. “Go peacefully, child, go peacefully and with the full grace of God...”
Suddenly the small room was shattered by the sound of the flat-line on the heart monitor. Cromartie’s hands were cold and lifeless within his own now but he dared not let go. He looked over at Warner and saw the surgeon lift out the young girl’s heart and place it in an organ transplant container. The attendant dressed in green quickly ran out of the room once the container was sealed. Doctor Warner looked over at his nurse and read the time of death from the clock on the wall.
McPhee gently laid the girl’s hands down under her chin, the only place left to put them, and took a step back to survey the scene. All of Brenda’s major organs had been removed and would be readied for immediate transplant into several waiting patients on various floors of God’s Mercy Memorial Hospital. Now his job was over, comforting the Voluntary Donor until the time of death was all that he was needed for. The rest of her body would now be prepped for more transplantable organ removal. The deep and empty chest cavity made McPhee feel very sorrowful and he tried to take comfort by once again looking at the girl’s beautiful face. He felt the tears again as he realized what he had done...the lie he had told this girl during her very last moments...a lie he had perpetuated more to soothe his own soul than that of Brenda Cromartie.
A Holy Pardon, what a ridiculous thing...controlled suicides were allowing the government to save billions of dollars in out-of-control healthcare costs each and every year, thus lowering the enormous healthcare burden to the taxpayers considerably. That money was now being used in other areas, to make the country better as a whole, the politicians claimed. It was funny how suicide had been considered a crime against the United States and a crime against God until the government learned how to make money off of it. Now it was called Voluntary Organ Donorship and the Donors were required to sign all manner of forms just before their ultimate act of ‘heroism’ to ensure that the U.S. Government couldn’t be held at fault.
Then came the counselors, mostly priests or men of religion with degrees in various forms of psychotherapy, to make everyone feel good about what was really going on. It then became his job to lie to young people and old people, the depressed and the disenchanted, to tell men and women that they would be greeted by God himself due to their selfless act of helping others by ending their own lives...it was a lie, Father Joseph McPhee knew. A lie that he had told dozens of times in the two years since suicides were legalized if done on a voluntary organ donorship basis. Organ transplants were now at all time highs, hospitals and surgeons were getting rich and famous as they performed more and more transplants. With the sudden influx of healthy transplantable organs, thousands of people were being given a second chance every day.
That was a good thing, McPhee tried to convince himself, saving many lives with the loss of just one, wasn’t it?
McPhee wandered out of Surgery Room #7 and into the hall just as another doctor entered and began to prepare Brenda Cromartie for further dissection. He slumped down on a bench in the hall and dreaded the call he would now have to make to Cromartie’s parents. It was unfortunate that the unborn baby inside Brenda’s womb had to die along with her, too young to survive in an incubator at only three months. Now he had to call the parents whom she was afraid to tell about the baby, the very reason why she had decided to die instead...
McPhee sat on the bench for a long time after Brenda Cromartie died, crying openly and asking God for forgiveness for the part he had played in this charade over the past two years. It seemed like a noble cause when he had first begun attending to the self-condemned, a way to help soothe these lost souls on their journey to the other side. But after Brenda, after seeing that beautiful young girl, so full of life and hope and future, slip away needlessly...taking an unborn child with her, he just didn’t know. He had just watched a girl die, a death that was made all the more easier by a program which the government wholeheartedly embraced and sanctioned. It wasn’t so long ago that a girl like that could have been saved by someone like him. Through proper counseling and spiritual guidance, Brenda Cromartie might have been turned back on to the path of life and lived for many years, a caring mother, a valuable member of society. It was a shame, such a damn awful shame...
“Father McPhee, you are needed in Surgery Room #3,” a tinny voice announced through a speaker in the hospital corridor. “Father McPhee, you are needed in Surgery Room #3...”
McPhee began to cry harder then as the bible slipped from his hand and scattered the rosary beads on to the soft carpeted floor.
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