LOIS GREENE STONE - A LIFETIME GUARANTEE

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​a lifetime guarantee

​ Ouija Boards had rules to follow during play.  Seriously. With its numbers, letters, pointer, some words, a person may communicate with unseen.  Don’t ask a question that might give a frightening response, and play it outside your home so the spirits’ energy will not invade  your private space.  Whew.  The little thing that moves while yours and your friends’ steady fingers touch it, planchette, must not be left on the board as bad luck could result.  So many scary things seem associated with this game, quite popular when I was a teen.
Yet, today, might medical science bring back Ouija Boards for life determination?  According to The Wall Street Journal, Friday March 22, 2019, Opinion Page, if a physician in America suggests a patient has six months left of life, and the human does not die in that framework, a hospice provider might sue the doctor for fraud.  “U.S. v. AseraCare is a civil fraud case, so the dispute is about money.” (‘Medicare’s Hospice Rules Could Make Your Doctor a Criminal’, by Kyle Clark and Andrew George, The Wall Street Journal, Friday March 22, 2019, Opinion Page)  
My older sister’s stomach cancer was aggressive; her congestive heart failure coupled with diabetes, shifted spine, and more were merely ‘things’, as was her open heart surgery.  Part of the stomach was removed, chemo, but eventually the entire stomach left her physical frame and a feeding tube was inserted.  She told me she was going to miss cream cheese, a childhood joke about her taking the whole package and putting the cheese between halves of a bagel and trying to eat that.  The 3,000 mile distance made visits by phone; she lapsed into a coma.  Her offspring were called to come.  This woman rode a camel in Egypt, traveled alone to places in the world few might do with a companion, and so wanted to live to sign up and be among the first passengers to soar into space.  Life-oriented, and daring, dying was just not an option to her brain just as physical/medical limitations to her were not ‘limits’ but just challenges. The family waited.  Since hearing is the last to go, when I telephoned and the receiver was cradled against her ear, she spoke and knew it was me, giggled about childhood, asked about my family.  The coma returned, but so did my phone calls and her becoming alert.  Her family waited longer.  She just liked life too much to allow it to leave in the time frame expected with such disease.  Some spark just took longer than predicted to extinguish.  If this were now, and not in 2005, might her doctors be sued because something in her will-to-live allowed more time?
       Most have heard “I want to live through Christmas” from a terminally ill person, and, in spite of science, the ‘will to survive’ gives that human a last family celebration?  If spirits might be aroused with a Ouija Board; hopes ignite via a Chinese fortune cookie; predictions anticipated from a horoscope; why can’t the force called life be, somehow, pushed and stretched for longer than calculations suggest?
Down with being subjective. ‘Based on scientific knowledge, I predict’ has to be an absolute. Sue the sports’ coach who said ‘if you warm up and exercise you lessen your chances for injury’ and you get injured after warming up and exercising.  What is ‘lessened’ anyway?  The dentist assumes your tooth crown will last ‘x’ years and it fails before that; sue him/her.  There’s a lifetime guarantee on your pillow’s firmness but a limited warrantee; what does that mean?  Hm.  Maybe that’s the way an American doctor can prevent being taken to court because all realistic calculations should have a terminally ill patient deceased within six months but stays alive longer: there’s a lifetime guarantee the person will die; there’s a limited warrantee in judgment to exact date.