c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) In Durham, N.C., a 17-year-old girl died after blood-typing errors undid a heart and lung transplant.

“What will happen now?” asks my wife.

Now the blaming and revenge begin.

This could bring down the hospital, I reply. A lawyer immediately signed up the girl’s family. Rather than help a devastated family deal with their grief, the malpractice industry will freeze them in anger. The surgeon’s immediate acceptance of responsibility will come back to haunt him. A hospital’s efforts at prompt and total disclosure will become weapons in court.

The family will become an icon in the battle against arrogant surgeons, arrogant hospitals and inept government agencies, a way to focus the vast unease that people feel about modern medical care.

A huge malpractice claim could paralyze the hospital, frighten off insurers, and undo decades of world-class medicine.

The case will expose gaps in the medical system, and every one of those gaps will become a target for blame _ not for improvement, necessarily, but for revenge. Second-guessing over the hospital’s public relations competency has already begun. Politicians will show up, too, and harvest their headlines from someone else’s woe.

Meanwhile, at the center of this tragedy is a Mexican family that has lost a daughter. In a world more concerned with healing than with revenge, they would be starting the long and painful process of burying the dead, wailing their grief and working their way to acceptance. As it is, their tears have become daggers. Worried friends’ cries of “murder” become headlines, not a moment’s anguished outburst.

Blame resolves nothing. Revenge resolves nothing. Monetizing a girl’s life resolves nothing. I am not an apologist for a hospital or an enemy of the legal profession. I just know that the work at hand is grieving, not blaming, and the work going forward should be fixing the gaps and learning from error, not crippling a hospital on which thousands of others depend.

These aren’t tobacco companies, after all, who knowingly and craftily deliver deadly addiction. These are people who made mistakes. A complex system needs to study those mistakes and take remedial action. But when error makes one a target, who will dare to admit error, who will learn from error?

The girl and her family weren’t caught in an evil system determined to make money at their expense. Events spun out of control, partly through human error, and partly, it seems, through the battlefield conditions that inevitably accompany major surgery. A dead girl and grieving family won’t benefit from punishing that system because it can’t fulfill our illusions of control.

The girl’s family and friends showed extreme behaviors during her ordeal _ because that is what anxious and heartsick people do. In facing death, people question everyone and everything, including their own desire to keep on living. A child’s death cuts deeper perhaps than any death. But those storms need to pass, not get frozen in place. When tragic loss makes one a cause and meal ticket, who will have room to grieve?

In my opinion, we need to view such things with the eyes of Jesus. When confronted with a leper whom the righteous had made an outcast, Jesus didn’t blame anyone _ the scribe for being callous, the townsfolk for exiling a leper, the leper himself for having an illness. He healed the man and sent him on to new life.

What could blame and revenge possibly add to that healing? Tasting the fullness of life isn’t won by argument or punishment, but by witnessing God at work. The people were amazed, not by Jesus’ smiting of the arrogant scribe, but by his compassionate care for a sick man. The people glorified God, not because God was revealed as vengeful judge, but because God touched a life and made it well.

Blaming and revenge feel great. They provide the illusion of potency and control. They distance us from the true impact of pain. They turn laments into lawsuits. But revenge corrodes our souls.

In the end, even now in this age of medical miracles, we are left with our grief and inadequacies. We need healing, not blaming.

DEA END EHRICH