On the Brink of the Abyss

With the world trembling once more on the brink of the abyss, the plight of a dying boy holds no cosmic significance. Events in the Middle East far overshadow the pain of that single fading life. Millions may suffer if the Persian Gulf explodes, while only few will cry for Richie Nunez.

But still ...

To see him lying motionless on a hospital bed, hooked to machines that preserve and monitor his life, to see his dark hair tousled as though he’s been out playing, claws at the heart as much as events in Iraq tear at our fears.

We die one by one, each light fading alone, no matter how massive the killing, or by what means. There is no comfort in numbers when the last breath is taken.

Richie Nunez, 14, is in the final stages of life because he can’t get a lung transplant. The reason he can’t get one is that it costs $200,000 and no one is willing to put up the money or do it for nothing.

No hospital will even involve itself in a fund-raising drive because, as one spokesman says, if the drive fails and the hospital doesn’t proceed with the operation, it will make the institution look bad.

He adds: “If we go ahead with it anyhow, it will cost us millions.”

Savor the irony. Billions for war, but not a penny for Richie Nunez.

I haven’t wanted to write this column. I dislike trading on human grief to seduce an audience. I’d rather make you laugh than make you cry.

But still ...

“I need help,” the mother told me, crying into the phone. “It’s my boy. . . .”

“If he lived in Brentwood and not in the barrio,” a child welfare worker said, “he’d have had the transplant already.”

Nothing is simple. Richie was born into a world that still measures significance by status, and by that measure, he has none.

Half Apache and half Mexican, his father is gone and his unemployed mother, Beverly Jojola, is on welfare.

The boy’s life has been hard from the beginning. At three months, he was stricken simultaneously with measles and pneumonia. That he survived at all was a mixed blessing. A time bomb was planted in his system.

“The sickness kept coming back over and over again,” the mother said. “He would have a hard time breathing, and the doctors would always say it was the flu. They told me to give him cough medicine and Tylenol and plenty of fluids. . . .”

We were in a small office near the intensive care unit of a Los Angeles hospital. Richie was under deep sedation. Machines breathed for him to relieve badly overworked lungs.

“Two years ago,” Beverly Jojola was saying, “when Richie got really sick, they told me he had a lung and kidney disease. He was put on dialysis last January, but they said he needed a lung transplant to live.”

She looked at me, not quite believing all this was happening, and said, “He could die.” Then she cried.

In all probability, Richie is dying. Even if the money were raised, or a hospital, in rare generosity, absorbed the cost of a transplant, it may already be too late.

Time was on their side once. Beverly Jojola used it trying to raise money through her church, without success.

Then one of Richie’s doctors said he would participate in a public appeal, but was discouraged from doing so by the hospital for which he works.

Image counted more than Richie did.

A request for funding was made to California Children’s Services, a state agency, but the request was denied. A lung transplant was too experimental.

L.A. Youth Programs, a private organization, tried with no better success than Jojola to stir interest in a fund-raising program.

Executive director Alice Drucker fumes at the notion that no one will help save Richie, but simultaneously asks that the hospitals involved not be named.

“They could withhold referrals,” she says helplessly,” and there are other children. . . .”

But still . . .

I stand over the bed of Richie Nunez and wonder what dreams will perish with this frail youth, what wonders will go unperceived.

“He’s so smart,” his mother says. “He gets straight As in everything. He said to me, ‘Tell them if they just lend us the money, I’ll pay them back after college.’ Oh, what a boy.”

There is no place for Richie Nunez in the cool disciplines of institutional mercy. His life is a blip in the system, and his death will mean no disruption in the public order.

I grieve over that as much as I grieve over the fading life of a boy brought down too early in his years.

If, as Nietzsche said, “When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” I fear for us all. The abyss, even now, looks back.