The only time viewers see pitless indigence on PBS is in still photographs of how poverty and public health used to intersect, at least in the west. In every documentary on death and dying, however, and my earliest was the Bill Moyers video narrative I honestly should have skipped, because I never forgot the sheer anguish of the veterinarian with ALS, his raw suffering, telling his physician he was going to inject himself with horse tranquilizer, sitting in a power chair seemingly equipped to tackle any civil war the Russian army might see fit to foster, very close to the end, begging his wife not to revive him again. She had him dressed in a polo shirt, rubbing his chest, regressively. I've seen countless of people dying, live and once removed by the camera holder who must record it all, and the midwestern animal doctor, expiring finally as Moyers went into post-production, penetrated, stayed, but there are limits. Nursing home residents get 30 second feeds. Anything else, whether the early Moyers, the various battles with cancer ending in defeat or remission, the muscular dsytrophy deterioration, which seems to be a favorite in the annals of clinical travail, have devoted loved ones tending to the demise of the stricken. This holds true for Atul's upgrade on Being Mortal. We don't get the demented dying alone in a ward, not unless it is a bad melodrama on the Spanish Civil War with Gregory Peck. I'm not faulting Atul on this. To coax viewers along directors need to soften our dissolution with thick sweet loving empathy, and there is real anguish within middle class affluence.
But barring extraordinary luck, most disabled people die in a war zone, not in hospital rooms with palliative care physicians. Literary eras seem to exhaust themselves in the same way, Henry James not immune to this flaw: "The Lessons of the Master," whatever its aim at Victorian marriage, is an over-sweetened pastry, certainly not a masterpiece, sans Portrait with the immortally vibrant Isabel.
With the death of James and Flaubert, as Eliot later stipulated, the novel of manners entered a curious phase of life support, slowly gasping to death, holding onto Victorian conceits in a more droll one-dimensional fashion, at a loss, ripe for the ravishes of Modernism to come: The Good Solder epitomizes this exhaustion with form. Ford creates types, not least among them the English Catholic, so important to Evelyn Waugh in his heyday and then to Jeremy Irons doing a magnificent rendition of Brideshead. In James, a gentleman of leisure is circumspect, engages in mysterious financial speculation. Ford, while still keeping the conventions of the caste, savages it. John Dowell is almost fatally bored with the recriminations of his class, and yet the two dimensional aspects of Ford's voice couched in his fortunately affluent American is what lends this narrative its humor: Florence the weak heart invalid duping her utterly dense husband. It is free public domain reading, Edwardian enriched sarcasm light enough for defeated savants, only able to struggle with Joaathan Weiner's difficult narrative shape for a few pages at a time.
Reviewers did not like Long For This World-- but as I search for interesting imperfections, I'm sympathetic, if overwhelmed at times, by Weiner's bizarre futuristic stretch. I look at Gawnde, the bubbly Asian Indian who wants to ease the writhing of our departure, while I have Weiner's complex and faulty narrative in my head. Do these agendas ever meet and coalesce in some fathomable dialogue?
Though I am not in immediate end stage, I'm dying, frightened, pissed off, Medical students have no idea how to optimize my outcomes. I stopped seeing them in 2007. I don't want to get locked in syndrome, lingering like a fucking android, barking like a rabid dog at minstrel niceties of urban ineptitude. This was my plan for joining our newly vaunted shared economy, my guerrilla warfare despite the successful prosecution of the group in Georgia for not doing a double take with a real nut case. Can I persuade them to come get me? If you watch Gawande's docu-drama, observe his neuro-oncologist colleague closely and you can see why doctors themselves snap out, not to be trusted. Someone has to do the brain cancer, but the women's face earned my pity.
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