Dylan Must Die

Human Life Review, Summer 2006 by Vincent, Stephen

Why?

That is the question any compassionate reader has after reading the lengthy Denver Post account of the death by dehydration of 4-year-old Dylan Walborn, who was born with multiple disabilities. Dylan died at home, 24 days after his feeding tube was removed, in the arms of his mother, while his father looked on, with the previous approval of doctors and nurses, and the full consent of the law.

Why?

Dylan, who suffered a stroke in his mother's womb, was not a healthy child by any definition. He could not walk, talk or perform voluntary movements; he needed tube feeding and suffered seizures. Doctors said he would not live a year, yet his strength surprised them all. His first years were happy enough though severely challenging for his parents, Kerri Burning and Dave Walborn, who never married. Though they'd been engaged briefly after their son's birth, the Post writer explains, "their short romance dissolved in the difficulty of caring for a severely disabled child and they called it off." Still, they arranged their lives and jobs to have apartments near one another and share the care of Dylan, who lived with his mother.

According to the Denver Post, when the seizures became more frequent, his parents began thinking about what was best for Dylan. Would he really want to live? A deadly thought, as it turned out.

Modern Macbeths

The article, by the paper's staff writer Kevin Simpson, begins with Dave Walborn holding Dylan, "all 32 pounds of him," and saying, "Dylan, it's OK if you want to go. I don't want you to hang on for me." The child gives no discernible response, yet Walborn finally joins the boy's mother in deciding that "Maybe it was time to let go." Of course, for Walborn to "let go" in the scene the Post writer describes, would mean to drop Dylan to the floor. But what Dylan's parents did over the following days, after the gastrointestinal tube was removed to cut off nutrition, was more than to drop their son. They watched him starve over the course of more than three weeks, growing bone thin, limp, lifeless and finally too weak to breathe. At one point, they even fretted that they were giving him too much water, and cut back on the few ounces he was receiving to keep him comfortable and help digest the pain killers. So much for Dylan wanting "to go."

At sometime during the 24-day ordeal, why didn't the nurse who made daily visits to monitor his "progress," the relatives who stopped by to take pictures and offer "going away" presents, or the doctors who received reports of his decline, take time to observe that perhaps Dylan was stronger than they'd thought. Maybe he wanted to stay. Bruning's mother, "Grandma Vicki," was a churchgoer who was praying for a miracle of healing, and even suggested that Dylan's resilience was a sign from God. But in the article she never confronts her daughter on the issue, and seems to accept that she knows best. The article's author writes that Dylan's parents saw the boy's persistence only as a sign that "Dylan will leave them when he's ready."

Indeed, Kerri Briming sets a high standard for God's intervention that even the widow of Nairn, whose son was raised by the command of Jesus, would not have demanded. "Unless he opens his eyes and says to me, Tm going to eat. I'm going to develop,' then I'm not going to consider this an act of God," she said firmly.

Yet let me be careful. It would be easy to paint Dylan's mother as a Rocky Mountain Lady Macbeth, who would "have pluck'd my nipple from [my babe's] boneless gums/And dash'd the brains out. . ." Dylan's father may play a somewhat less introspective Macbeth, with his doubts about the enterprise overcome by his girlfriend's insistence and a final "fatal vision." Their characters, with allowances for modern twists of mind, may indeed fit the roles, and they may be subject to the most severe moral censure. Yet if Dylan's parents are moral monsters, they had a lot of help from the finer medical minds of our time, as well as the imprimatur, so to speak, of a parttime Christian minister, who prayed with them for God's guidance. If they had heard the words "wait" or "what?" or "why?" from an authoritative source, they may have been shaken to their senses and thought twice about their decision.

In Shakespeare's play, after Macbeth wields the knife and kills King Duncan, there is a pounding at the castle door that wakes him from his trance-BOOM! BOOM!- the sound of conscience, culture, the law of God and of man straining with all the might of right to enter the horrid scene. The King is Dead! Yet when Dylan dies-24 days after his tube was surgically removed under the auspices of the Denver Children's Hospital-there is silence. Conscience is convenience, the culture is death, the law is approving and God has been assigned a part-time pastor's role. I can imagine Dylan's mother with that "damned spot" upon her hands, seeking to wash it clean and suffering all the more because no one will tell her what she did was wrong. She will see Dylan's face, at waking or at sleep, and will know in her own mother's heart that she crossed a moral border, broke a taboo more deeply rooted than the murder of a king-she killed her own child-because she would not give her mother's milk, the most basic care of food and drink. She is able to live with the guilt, at least by daylight, because she receives smoothing smiles of support instead of censure for her deed. It would be wrong to call her a victim, but she is definitely a casualty of our culture of death, one of the walking wounded whose worst tendencies toward self-interest and justification were validated when they should have been restrained from the start.