I AM SITTING with my friend Christine reading a play by Euripedes. She explains that the Greeks had many words for justice, but in the particular case that we’re discussing, the term used by Dionysus meant civil behavior, respectful engagement. Christine, truly a brilliant woman and a mentor to me, is now well into her 90’s. Once tall and stately, her back has twisted, so getting from her reading chair and moving to the table where she eats involves a series of moves, not for the faint of heart.
Christine and I share the same physician, and I ask how her last appointment went. She shakes her head as if to say “Enough of this talk” and turns the conversation to words that have historically changed their meaning.
The next time we meet, I again bring up the topic of her last doctor visit. “Damn it,” she exclaims. “She mom’ed me.”
I push a bit. “She called you mom?”
“She called me ‘mom’ in the third person and addressed my daughter in front of me, as in ‘Let’s see how mom is doing.’”
I remembered my own mother, about the age I am now, dealing with the same phenomenon. A team of Yale physicians-in-training came round with their mentor to meet the patients, in this case my mother, who suffered from pancreatic cancer. They stood at the foot of her hospital bed while I sat off to the side on a nearby chair. Clipboards in hand, they conferred quietly and finally looked at me. “I think we should go with a chemo regimen,” their leader began.
My mother, propped up on a couple of pillows, called out to the “attending”: “Doctor, let’s teach them right.” She then took her hand and pointed with her two fingers directly at her own two eyeballs.
“Eye contact,” she went on. “I am the patient. Tell my daughter to take notes if you wish, but look at me. Interact with me. Ask if I have any questions. “
I’m thinking back to Dionysius. The last thing anyone needs as they deal with old age and infirmity is being turned into a nobody. This is an injustice of the civil sort. Even if the mom is not as cogent as she might once have been, assume that she is. Start with a you, not a her or a him.
Or better yet, start with the physicians.
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Wendy Saul is on the board of the Rosendale Theater in Rosendale, NY, and is urging everyone in the Mid-Hudson Valley to come celebrate Women’s History Month at the theater on March 30 to see clips from a new documentary based on Elisabeth Israels Perry’s After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia’s New York (Oxford University Press). Both the book and film describe the early successes of New York feminists in bringing down the corrupt practices of Tammany Hall and enacting a reform agenda.
Excellent
Great read, great points!