third place
TRANSCRIPT
Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter 2005 ( C© 2005)DOI: 10.1007/s10912-005-7704-3
Third Place
Joanna Pearson1
“Watching TV with a Woman Dying of AIDS”
About suffering I was always wrong,no true master: I thought it happened withat least a splash or some forsaken cry;and, sure, there are famines, holocausts, and bombs –real disasters, the painted scenes in halls,but mostly it just happens all along.
How, for every tear-stained face and lamentation,elders gaping in the smoke of crumbled wallsand shouldering their dead with sooty arms,there is a man bereft who’s focused onperfecting chess moves in his littered yard.One can’t always frame it even when you gaze directly:the reverend whose son was just shot in a drive-by,or the battered socialite wife, they still smileand pat the dog and say “excuse me” brushingpast another shopper in the aisle.
Sitting here, for instance, we don’t talk abouthow your body slips away and wastes.It yields at no confronting, there is no comfort,acknowledgement at this point changes nothing.We watch “Cops” instead. Silently we facethe yelling on the screen—a drug bust,
1Address correspondence to Joanna Pearson, 3051 Guilford Ave., Baltimore, MD 21218; e-mail:joanna [email protected].
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a high-drama sting operation. Some woman stands half-nakedwhile her home is wrecked, weeping in hair-rollersas her thug husband, facedown on the floor, is handcuffed.The police shout miranda rights, her face crumples,the cheap mascara melts,and I on the couch, you in your last wheelchair,we feel such sorrow for her.