My friend Rodney Clapp’s gentle entry into the health care reform debate begins thus. Read the whole thing at The Christian Century.

The intense debates over health-care reform have brought to mind some poignant memories. When my father was in his early 40s he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our entire family was shaken, but perhaps no one more than Granddad and Grandma Clapp. Moving into their elderly years, they had to watch a son die.

To eke out a living, Granddad Clapp had left his family when he was 15 or 16. Coming of age during the Great Depression, he cowboyed and hired out as a farmhand. Over time he scratched together enough money to buy cropland in the Oklahoma Panhandle. He stuck with it through the monstrous dust storms of the 1930s, plowing down sand dunes on an iron-wheeled tractor. After decades of sweat and the good luck of finding oil beneath their land, Granddad and Grandma finally learned what it was like to live with plenty rather than scarcity. 

So you can see why, before those terrible days of my father’s illness, Granddad Clapp in my eyes had always been a tough, stoic man of the soil. And you can understand why I was surprised that, one day when we got a few minutes alone, Granddad cried. I had never seen him weep. He put a labor-weathered hand on my knee and said, “Now I’ve got all this money. And there’s nothing I can do with it to make your dad well.” I wouldn’t have put it this way then, but Granddad had come eye to eye with the truth that many human goods—and health is one of them—cannot be comprehended or determined by money. There are limits to the reach of the market.

When I was eight, my best friend was Brian Bennett. Brian and I enjoyed the same games. We laughed at the same nonsense, the same elementary school jokes. We played so hard together my father says that when he tucked me into bed at night I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. It was 1967.

Brian’s mom and mine often took us to the library there in Fort Bliss, Texas. That year, he and I read one hundred books a piece, recording each title and author on a certificate I still have in my scrapbook. We enjoyed sports, and books involving sports. I remember Matt Christopher’s Too Hot to Handle. A boy named David Kroft loves baseball — his father and big brother were really good at baseball — but David is a slowpoke and thinks he makes too many errors. How will he handle the pressure of living up to the family name?

Brian got sick. He had a brain tumor. I didn’t know what a tumor was. He was at William Beaumont Hospital up the hill from our house on Field Road. I was born in that hospital. My mom and dad had both gone there for surgeries. I thought Brian would get better.

They didn’t let kids visit patients in hospitals back then. One night, I woke up in my father’s arms. He was holding me tight. His chest was heaving. His tears were falling on my face. He rocked me back and forth as if I were a baby. And he told me that Brian died.

I was confused. Why couldn’t I have gone to the hospital to tell Brian to get better? Why didn’t he come home? At the funeral, on a sunny day, I watched Sgt. Major and Mrs. Bennett crying. I watched the casket being lowered into the ground. I rubbed my eyes with two questions. Why did Brian die? What will I do without him?

We didn’t go to church when I was growing up. We went on Christmas and Easter, I’m told, but I have only vague memories of that. My first vivid memory of church is of being in the Fort Bliss main chapel for Brian’s funeral. I became aware of something that day, something that I would appreciate only later; that Church was like my mother. She was where you could go when you couldn’t cope; the one whose skirt you could hold on to when it was time to say goodbye. And she was better than the hospital. She let you in.

The cemetery where Brian was buried we could see from our house. It was down the hill, beyond the other end of Field Road. My mother says that every day for months she could see Iris Bennett, Brian’s mother, walking back and forth at the grave.

He was a bachelor when I first met him, living in an apartment that was said to resemble a bachelor’s nightmare. I never saw it. Few did. When he got serious about Marlene and realized he would sooner or later have to take her there, he asked his sister to clean it up “just enough so I can have a cleaning person come in.” I gather it wasn’t filled with rotting Kentucky Fried Chicken or anything. It was simply filled with everything he had ever brought home and put down, still there wherever it landed, and had never been dusted. He and Johnny Morris made a bet once with a TV set as the wager. When Johnny lost, he got a giant old console set and had it delivered to Gene’s apartment. The delivery guys dumped it inside the door. It was never moved, and from then on the door never opened all the way.

There was always a little of the Yale undergraduate in Gene. Tim Wiegel, his roommate there, later a sportscaster, told me Gene was famous for wearing a Batman costume and dropping out of trees. He studied philosophy, considered law school, decided to take some time off first. “I told my dad I thought I’d like to try a job in newspapers,” Gene said. “He said he’d give me a ride downtown. We had always been a Sun-Times family. For some reason, I never knew why, he dropped me off in front of Tribune Tower.” Less than a year after walking in the door, he was the Tribune’s film critic.

from Roger Ebert’s blog at the Chicago Sun-Times