Poetry
McMullen, Richard E.
words, he raised his restrained arms in abortive gesture. On the eve of my birthday, he squeezed my hand and smiled, delivering as sweet a gift as this daughter shall receive. On his last "good"...
...How quickly theories crumble when they meet reality, in this case when the nurse becomes the daughter of the desperately ill patient...
...Through the operation...
...To remain alive to the mystery and preciousness of the whole, this is the legacy and lesson bestowed through the power of my father's left hand...
...With so little left to do for him, we directed our solicitude toward each other, taking turns in the chair closest to his left hand which continued to gesture with an eloquence made more profound by all that had been stripped away...
...The ventilator was turned off...
...We were catapulted from holiday celebrations into a medical morass we could not control, justify, or escape...
...Why the essence of my father, the great vitality of the man, settled in his left hand, I do not know...
...The full burden of all we cannot know still weighs heavily...
...So, he thought...
...This description hardly indicates the texture of the play because the scenes are often very funny, sometimes sentimental, more often simply ruthless...
...Dave, in particular, evokes the glamour of Ruritania even though it takes place in contemporary America...
...No out-of-the-bodys, no tunnels, no lights...
...a broad-spectrum antibiotic might be helpful...
...In both films, as in Anthony Hope's romance, an innocent is forced to substitute for a figure of power and/or notoriety and, through pluck and common sense, the sub outdoes the subbed...
...The multidisciplinary conference we requested lent medical sanction to the obvious: aggressive treatment had become useless, crossing the invisible but crucial line between support and maintenance...
...He recalled only nothing: no before the operation, no during, no afterward...
...rewrite it, till it is a view of a brighter, more enhancing hue...
...I'm alive...
...Angels is a serious play which is also a grotesque comedy that brings us back to the angel who crashes through the roof at the end of the play...
...He has made a son of sorts of Joe Pitt, a slightly bent straight arrow, a conservative Mormon lawyer, whom he wants to redesign in his own image, to teach him to "transgress a little, Joseph...
...de Vito Roles Rewritten This time, the replay recalls their brief, outdistanced time together, finds Lucifer recast--as is-and not in any way at all the angel he was before the fall...
...As the final reality descended with its attendant remorse, I thought my great sorrow was born from our inability to care for my father as we had wished, to offer him what all our grandparents had known--a gentle death in one's own home...
...We were repeatedly cautioned not to relinquish hope prematurely...
...With it to guide my practice, I hope to help others to live and die more simply, with less fragmentation...
...The nurses would wake him up...
...and he, not m some shining spot is tucked in his allotted slot Santayana said those who do nol remember the past are condemned to relive it...
...asked the Irish poet from his tower...
...For instance, the hero is so ignorant of even the rudiments of government that he has to be taught about the three branches, yet when his handlers place him at the presidential podium to coach him for his 20:16 July 1993 Commonweal...
...For Cohn, life is the getting and wielding of power, which is why he denies his homosexuality, renames his AIDS to the straighter cancer because gays and AIDS victims are powerless...
...It happened without warning and it unfolded with unimaginable rapidity...
...What happened to my father and his children serves as a caveat...
...With a daughter's hard-won insight, I hope for a health-care system that does not contort the whole to serve the parts, an environment in which one can be both nurse and daughter without feeling one betrays the other...
...Milligram...
...I'm going to hell for doing this," says Joe, the good Mormon, when he finally accepts that he is homosexual and goes off with Louis, a damnation that is certainly more positive than our last sight of Harper, settling into the comfort of an imaginary Antarctica...
...At the foundation of current nursing philosophy is what is known as systems theory: We are, each, a web spun of interconnecting strands, multiple systems...
...Each specialist had a case to make: his tumor type displayed "exquisite" sensitivity to treatment...
...now we were defeated by it...
...It did so in testimony to that which tests cannot measure...
...Dave might very well be mistaken as satire, for it does sport with some satirical notions in its first half...
...D 18:16 July 1993 Commonweala vehicle that Ron Leibman makes the most of...
...became clear that extending his life meant prolonging his dying, we gathered the specialists...
...There is no final and absolute moral to this family's story...
...He had lived...
...O body swayed to music, O brightening glance/How can we know the dancer from the dance...
...Is the angel announcing the end of something or the beginning...
...This time, no virtual halo rests at rakish angle on his head...
...complete it" and let him fall backward into nothing again...
...As the derelict and perhaps psychotic woman in act 3 says, "In the new century I think we will all be insane...
...Norman Cohn writes: A boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number" of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating--here, it would seem, lay the source of that peculiar subterranean fanaticism which subsisted as a perpetual menace to the structure of medieval society...
...His grip remained strong even though his body was exhausted...
...At last, after one waking, he realized it was not a dream...
...He did not add, as he might have done...
...It may be suggested that here, too, lies the source of the giant fanaticisms which in our day have convulsed the world...
...The transgressions Roy has in mind are political, legal, professional, but Joe has stifled transgressions of his own...
...That last night in ICU, alone with my father, I shared the quiet and what sleep we could manage...
...GERALD WEALES SCREEN E.B...
...his blood gases remained "good...
...nutrition must not be withdrawn while a machine continued to pump in breath...
...Death is a process that does not end with interment...
...Do we have to wait for part 2? Should I quit asking questions and simply accept that Angels in America is a play almost as impressive as the hoopla surrounding it...
...Then, seconds before the pain and discomfort took over his body, it came to him: It is all right if I live...
...And still, with what tenacity 1 struggled to believe further medical manipulations might restore integrity to the whole...
...it is all right, if not...
...We left him that night in hopes of better luck the next day, but during the early morning hours he developed intractable hiccoughs and when thorazine did not work, he was restarted on a sedative drip...
...With my head against his chest I moved in tandem with his breathing and it was unclear who was taking care of whom...
...we drew the curtain around us...
...The gentlest of vibrations spreads reverberations throughout...
...For when Dave, a Joe Average impersonating a stroke-disabled president at the behest of a power-mad chief of staff, first tours the White House, we are meant to catch our breaths just as he does at the sight of so much plush carpeted, crystal chandeliered splendor, to ooh and ah at the idea of a commoner having free access to the trappings of royalty...
...I have left the hospital for community-based nursing...
...It speaks to what can become the shackles of medical technology but it is more than a reiteration of the limits of specialized, reductionist medicine...
...He slowly faded, exiting by increments, Cheshirelike in a medical wonderland...
...We removed the restraints, freeing our tethered father from the tinkerings of specialists...
...now we want to do this: explain something complicated...
...Louis, whose path has crossed Joe's often in the play, has guilt of his Own, having deserted Prior, whom he loves, because he does not have the courage to watch AIDS destroy Prior...
...Always the whole transcends the sum of its parts...
...He never again fully broke surface...
...He has spent his life smothering his homosexual longings and, in the process, has helped turn his wife Harper into an hysteric, a woman obsessed by a man threatening her (Joe, of course) whose only escape is dream journeys...
...As a nurse, I hope the health-care reforms to be fashioned protect the dignity of the individual from what can be harsh and intimidating in institutionalized medicine...
...On his last "good" day he attempted to write but we could not decipher the message...
...He was awake--alive...
...When it Richard E. McMullen I! Came to Him From nothing he woke to a dull dream about nurses...
...Is the angel simply a stage device, perhaps a comic one, looking toward something better than the human losses and failures embedded in the gay fantasia, the national themes...
...Of course 1 have caught on to the idea that we are a democracy and that all presidents (even when they're not Harry Truman) are common men, but, in so far as Dave works at all, it does so as Zenda-esque romance: a commoner walks among aristocrats and proves himself a natural aristocrat...
...We watched and he disappeared, leaving behind not a grin but the legacy of his left hand...
...that those who do...
...announce, Mr...
...This time, a script completely new denies what she seemed committed toz the role of puppet, pawn or toy-MISTAKEN IDENTITIES 'DAVE' & 'EL MARIACHI' he prisoner of Zenda is at large again, courtesy of two recent, well received movies: Dave and El Mariachi...
...At the end, however, I was less certain...
...We waited, hoping he could somehow mend these disparate parts by force of will...
...We had been contemptuous of medical technology...
...Where does that leave the AIDS victim as prophet...
...But long after his voice was silenced by an endotracheal tube, his arms tied down to protect the airway, and his eyes had been clouded by drugs, his left hand continued to open and close, to rise and fall...
...He saw now the recovery room, the nurses, his family...
Vol. 120 • July 1993 • No. 13
