Wickedly Grateful: Notes on Being Human #1

On Ariana Grande, pediatric emergencies, and the meaning of life

This is the first in my new series for paid subscribers, Notes on Being Human.

Much of what’s happening in biotech can feel overwhelming and even hopeless. As Christians, we are called to bring light into the darkest places. Choosing Human is my attempt to do just that in my little corner of the internet—to bring hope to the fraught ethical questions we wrestle with, to remind us of the goodness and beauty that we are made for, and to choose what is truly human in a world that wants to rewrite us.

This series will be a more intimate glimpse into the thought processes behind my writing—a place where I can explore moral intuitions I’m still discerning (like embryo adoption and chimeric organs) and offer something deeper to those who offer ongoing support for my research and writing.

This first note is free to all, with gratitude for the many blessings of this week.

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I accidentally missed Mass this past Sunday.

In my defense, my daughter wasn’t breathing.

Our oldest has come down with a nasty cough on Saturday night, so my husband and I had decided to go separately. He left early to attend Mass and drop off the hefty Thanksgiving meal boxes we’d assembled for the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

I’d opted for the early shift with the kids, looking forward to an uncharacteristically quiet Mass in a pew devoid of squirming and the low-level anxiety of suppressing our chaos to a respectable level.

I never made it that far.

Instead, I found myself rushing to clothe and shuffle all four children into the car, hastily shoving snacks and coloring books into a busy bag to occupy them during what I hoped wouldn’t be a long wait at the urgent care (our regular activities were at Mass with my husband). The oatmeal I’d prepped the night before stood untouched on the table; there wasn’t time for that.

Finally piled into the car with four matching pairs of shoes and not quite that many winter coats, we rolled past our urgent care, closed on Sundays, and I held my breath, praying that the new one they’d build just down the street was finally open for business.

I’d railed against this building just a few short months earlier. When we first moved into our home nearly 5 years ago, the two-lane highway of our freeway exit had been bordered by a long stretch of fields, punctuated by a diner and farm supply store.

After half a decade of nonstop construction, those two lanes have grown to six, now boasting all the trappings of suburbia:

• Baskin Robbins

• drive-through coffee bar (at least it isn’t Starbucks)

• Home Depot

The shiny red urgent care is the cherry on top. But not for me. If our little corner of the world had to be swept up in development, why couldn’t it be something interesting, like a bookstore, or a nursery, or even a fancy cheese shop?

Despite my protests, on the day we desperately needed it, it was open.

I herded our zoo into the waiting room, and they all perched on various faux-leather chairs (easier to disinfect that way) while I checked my daughter in. The moment I explained her symptoms—low blood oxygen, high heart rate, and difficulty breathing—they rushed her in to triage without a wait.

As we passed through the threshold, I vowed I would never disparage that cherry-red building again.

The Gift of Modern Medicine

It’s common in bioethics, where we try to diagnose and heal the ailments of medicine, to bemoan the system and rag on Big Pharma.

The same is true of the crunchy circles I’ve joined in my search for solutions to chronic illness, where the medical system has failed us. I won’t deny that medicine has its share of problems (for a good read on this, check out Aaron Kheriaty’s Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine).

But in this week of giving thanks, I find myself endlessly, ridiculously grateful for modern medicine—just as it is.

As it turns out, that visit to urgent care where they administered a life-saving breathing treatment for our daughter’s asthma exacerbation, clearing her airways and relieving her hypoxia, was only the first this week.

I’d be back a second time with our 3-year-old, whose scraped skin now had an ominous redness creeping up her leg, hot an angry, accompanied by pain causing her to walk with a limp. For a second time this week, one of our children was facing a common childhood ailment that escalated from minor to serious overnight.

We left with dual prescriptions for antibiotics in hand, topical and oral, with the doctor’s assurance that we had caught what was probably a strep infection just in time; were that redness to creep any further up her thigh, he instructed us to report directly to the ER.

As I would later reflect to my husband, “In another time, we could have easily lost both of our little girls this week.”

The Things We Take for Granted

In this season of counting our blessings, I find myself grateful for many things I usually take for granted, banal things like:

• easy access to medical care

• albuterol inhalers

• antibiotics (and the fact that all three cost our family less than $6)

And then I reflect that these items, commonplace for us, are still out of reach for many in our world. I’m ashamed to admit that I’d actually wrinkled my nose at the canned vegetables, premade frosting, and processed cake mix on the list for stuffing those Thanksgiving boxes we’d delivered.

Our family would be eating a feast of fresh, organic, made-from-scratch delicacies. It often feels like a burden that, because of my autoimmune disease, I have to eat this way to stay well. I forget what a gift it is that I can eat this way; it’s a gift we can eat any meal at all.

Gratitude is its own gift, the precondition for receiving anything as gift at all. It the doorway to revelry in our blessings, the threshold we must pass if we wish to avoid being inured to the goodness of each moment.

The Truth about Happiness

Sandwiched between mini-emergencies this week, our family managed a trip to the movie theater (discount Tuesdays! Another gift!), to see Wicked: For Good, which the kids and I loved (content warning: implied intimacy). My husband, not so much.

Despite Ariana Grande’s emaciated figure and the fillers preventing any semblance of normal human expression, I thought her performance was strikingly decent—particularly as she crooned out the ironic chorus to “Thank Goodness,"

I couldn’t be happier
because happy is what happens
when all your dreams come true

well, isn’t it?

clearly conveying that her character is finally realizing how false this is (perhaps, as a chart-topping singer, Grande knows this all too intimately).

By contrast, my daughter is using her renewed access to oxygen to belt out the truth about human happiness, from the genre of gratitude (among other, less virtuous, things), country music:

There’s always gonna be a higher high
You can chase for the rest of your life
Greener grass in the yard next door
Or a shined up Chevy a little newer than yours

You’re never gonna fill an empty cup
If what you got’s still not enough
The thing about happiness I’ve found is
It don’t live in bigger houses

— “Bigger Houses” by Dan and Shay

I recently devoured the novel Happiness for Beginners (skip the movie) and promptly binged all fifteen of Katherine Center’s “bittersweet comic novels.”

In Happiness, the protagonist discovers that the key to happiness isn’t that “all your dreams come true,” but in shifting your mind to, as St. Paul instructs, “In all circumstances, give thanks,” (1 Thess. 5:18).

This isn’t about adopting a Pollyana facade or donning rose-colored glasses to see the bright side; it’s about neuroplasticity and our ability to reshape our experiences of the world by, as St. Paul also advises, “taking every thought captive,” (2 Cor. 10:5).

(For more on how Christian practices are the key to lasting happiness—according to secular psychology, see Chris Kaczor’s The Gospel of Happiness).

Center’s novels are so lovely because her protagonists grapple with serious obstacles and the reality of human suffering, testifying to the triumph of the human spirit across a variety of circumstances—not in grand accomplishments, but in simple gratitude for the goodness of what is.

An Abundance of Ordinary Gifts

This week, I am grateful for:

• hot coffee on frosty mornings

• bright orange pumpkins

• nontoxic candles

• crunchy leaves

• pharmaceuticals that allow me a functioning life

• a body that allows me to love concretely through acts of service

• a warm house and soft sheets

• grain-free, dairy-free chocolate pecan pie

• great books and bottomless cups of tea

• You, reading this newsletter, leaving thoughtful comments, and supporting this work

I am grateful for my friend Emily, who faithfully liked every post in my early writing years and, without even realizing it, kept me going with that encouragement. Who is still teaching me to memento mori from her place in Heaven.

I am grateful to feel grateful, which is itself a gift—maybe the gift?—and the cornerstone of a meaningful life.

What are the extraordinary, ordinary gifts in your life this season?

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In the coming months, I aim to share reflections like this one with you monthly, plus original essays and curated link roundups on faith, family, and the future of being human.

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Thanks for reading.

AMDG,
Samantha