Commentary : A Man Who Died Could Have Been Saved: How Is It That He Wasn’t?

The kid in front of me squirmed and twisted a good deal. He was long and bony and his knees hurt him during the 40 minutes of kneeling. The men next to him were better padded. They had the big rounded shoulders of ex-fighters, now accustomed to heavy lifting, still in their work shirts, black men with Spanish names. They were brother-images to the man in the coffin.

Visible in the open casket under a veil of white gauze was the forehead of Juan Antonio Jimenez, age 43. He lay banked by flowers in a Westminster chapel, in one of those moments of rented luxury that are granted the poorest bereaved. And beneath the comfortable folds of his satin bedding lay the legs that had been infected with the gangrene that killed him.

His ordeal, as you may have read, lasted 20 days. He had been struck and hurt on the road north of Brawley and lodged in a desert hospital that had neither means nor equipment to deal with his injuries. There were nine that could, including four major centers in Orange County. The desert doctors strove mightily to get Jimenez admitted--still alive, still savable--to one of the nine. Not one felt able to take him.

All of these Houses of Healing had good and sufficient reasons, issued through spokespersons, for turning Jimenez away. UCLA couldn’t take him because he was too far off. Three San Diego hospitals couldn’t find doctors to admit him. UC San Diego suggested Orange County because it was, after all, his home. UCI Medical Center adjudged itself full. St. Joseph couldn’t take him because it didn’t have a Medi-Cal contract. Fountain Valley thought he was too far away. I forget why Western Medical couldn’t take him, but no doubt the reason was sound and clothed in the fact that no one without money or medical coverage has a legal right to be healed. Juan Jimenez would not be lying beneath a brown cross in Westminster if he’d had a Blue Cross in his wallet.

Bienaventurados los que sufren porque ellos seran consolados.

The priest recited the liturgy and the audience responded softly in Spanish. I think I was the only Anglo there, surely the only blond. The Jimenez widow and her household of eight shared their sorrow in the accustomed pew. My lack of Spanish left me free for somber reflections of another kind.

How could a county of generous people be so collectively stingy?

We live in the most-favored county of a well-favored state. Yet we can’t afford to save a neighbor who mortally needs our help. Are we so busy making our own little pile of money and keeping it that we’ve forgotten we have neighbors? Was there no way we could have assured the funding of needed facilities without endless delay and further studies?

Yeah, we could have and should still.

Unless a decade of self-devotion has turned us into a county of clerks, assistant administrators, company spokespersons, mid-rank bureaucrats, subcommittee co-chairmen and dancing figures on a WordPerfect screen. Unless we’ve become so businesslike about passing the buck we’ve forgotten what our business is.

Juan Jimenez was our business because he was our neighbor. Part of our county. One of us. So were the heavy-shouldered mourners saying the rosary in Westminster. They do the county’s hard work, getting their nails dirty so we can keep ours clean. Those who don’t know this aren’t up on things, and those who don’t care have souls that are running on empty.

Yet we let him die on a Sunday morning of gangrene. Nobody dies of gangrene in a civilized place anymore. It is like a man dying of scurvy because nobody will give him an orange.

In 62 unsheltered years I have seen death in most of its forms. I cannot remember one that has saddened me more. This one seemed tragic because it needn’t have happened, suggesting a medieval carelessness about life unworthy of a glamorous county in this modern age.

I never knew Jimenez and didn’t know his family. But I had to go to his rosary, and I did and left by the side door.