Don’t Touch My Organs, Bruh.

Last week, the degenerate actress Anne Heche was involved in a serious car accident in Southern California. The video of the aftermath is horrific to watch as Heche, seemingly somewhat conscious, bolts upright off of the gurney she had been placed on by paramedics. I cannot begin to imagine what was in whatever was left of her mind during that moment. The EMT’s clearly believed she was either dead or completely and utterly moribund. They were just as shocked as the helicopter reporter hovering over the scene.

The simple fact is, as the Fathers have told us and anyone who’s ever witnessed death can attest, the final moments of human life are not pretty, to put it mildly. How much more torturous, then, must our exit interview be if we hadn’t even attempted a pious life, let alone lived as though God does not exist? I do not know Anne Heche, never met her. What I do know is the image of herself she perpetrated in the media. I pray that her final moments were illuminated with a desire for contrition as I pray the same for myself every day.

Yet it is what we read now, some days later, about her “condition” that truly troubles me. From The Daily Mail we read the following.

I’m not going to get into the sciency, medical stuff here. I’ll link to that instead. Do check it out. The author of this piece, Jay Boyd, does a fantastic job of summing up what’s really been going on in the past 50 years. Funny, but the medical community seems to have gone completely haywire since about the time of Vatican II. Odd, isn’t it? But please check not only that page but the accompanying links. A pullquote below might entice you if you haven’t already clicked above.

So now I will tell you why this is so personal to me, why the box on my license is marked in dark Sharpie “NOT AN ORGAN DONOR“. I see the ridiculous bumper stickers (usually on Priuses alongside Kucinich for President tags). “Don’t take your organs to heaven. Heaven knows we need them right here!” Indeed, I need them right here. In my corpse. In a box in the ground awaiting the moment when my soul comes back to chastise the whole of my body for years of sin.

I was four years-old when my family’s house caught fire in the middle of a cold February night. The memory of that night is, in fact, my first conscious memory. Terrible things are seared into my head. Mostly I remember the sense of urgency and the darkness. People think that fires are bright and flames are everywhere. That isn’t true. Thick, acrid, black smoke is everywhere. One of my older sisters who was twenty-one years-old at the time raced through a set of adjoining bedrooms trying to gather as many of us as she could. Our parents’ bedroom was at the opposite end of the hall and the fire had raced up the stairs and cut off access. My mother tells me she got on her knees and started to pray that her children wouldn’t suffer. She says she literally felt the Holy Ghost on her, consoling her until the moment my dad told her they had to go and pointed to the window.

Meanwhile down the hall I remember crawling past a bed in one of the two bedrooms and stumbling on my older brother. He was six. And what I remember was his paralysis. He would not move from the terrible fear of what was going on around him. In the commotion, I lost sight of him. Next thing I know, I was on a second-floor porch overlooking the snow covered ground. Fire engines below frightened me to the point that I still cannot get near one forty years later. I watched as my sister picked up and then tossed several of our siblings. Then it was my turn. I remember pleading with her not to throw me overboard. My sister – my hero – did what she had to do and I am alive today, albeit with a double-fused spine. Not to worry, though, the back problems didn’t manifest until I was an adult. Other than a dead twin sister and two dead brothers, I had a beautiful childhood. True, our lives were never the same but who am I to question God’s Will? Fulton Sheen once wrote that (and I paraphrase): “Sometimes God takes the littlest lambs from the flock and carries them to higher ground so that the other sheep will follow.”

I recount these events here because in the days that followed, my father was asked to donate the organs of my brother (he who had been too scared to move). The third sibling to die, ten years-old, succumbed to smoke inhalation later that week, though I understand his organs were too damaged to harvest. One of my siblings will correct me if I am wrong. But not the six year-old. And my father, thinking this was a noble deed, consented. And he truly learned the savagery of the organ harvesting industry. As I have had it told to me, Dad went into the room after the transplant team emerged carrying an Igloo ice chest. They hadn’t even cleaned him up. They took his corneas. I always remember hearing that. Not sure what if anything else they took. To them, my brother was a commodity. But he was “brain dead” so there’s that. But, you see, they kept him alive to take what they needed.

The whole topic disgusts me to this day.

And that’s all I really wanted to say on this beautiful Saturday morning. Also, don’t ever touch my organs. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for the Angelus. Bong bong bong…

Our Lady, Queen of Peace, pray for us!