It’s the workaholics who are told that “your work is your life”. It’s many in academia who find that they are drawn to study the issues that afflict them or plague them or trouble them most about themselves or about the world. But in the case of Margaret “Peggy” Battin, a respected philosopher and bioethicist, it just so happened that the scholarship that she spent her life pursuing studying, end-of-life issues and ethics, has now come into play in her real life–as a result of a tragedy that has befallen her husband, who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down.
Now she must grapple, in real life, with the abstract questions, that her scholarship has for decades. Many of us who work in bioethics realize when they face the illness of a child or parent that the tough questions about end-of-life care are just as tough even for those of us who have the “training” and “expertise” that are supposed to equip us to handle precisely those situations. But few of us take the time to reflect on that experience or to share it with others. This is precisely what Peggy has done–and with grace and emotion that is incredible.
There are no words to describe Peggy’s journey with her husband but her own. Her film, comprised of black and white photos of his journey through treatment and his on-going recovery from his spinal cord injury and her experience as caregiver, spouse and friend, tells of both his and her own metamorphosis as a result of this accident. The film, Metamorphosis, found here, is a must-see for anyone interested in end-of-life issues and will reconceptualize how one thinks about caring, caregivers, and one’s own relationship to “knowing” an area of scholarship and living it.
We wish Peggy and her husband, Brooke Hopkins, the best on their road together. It was amazing to see the transformation and to see something so beautiful and moving arise out of tragedy.
Summer Johnson, PhD