In the article's last paragraphs she said that what is most important to dying people is feeling the doctors will "stay with them until the end." They fear being abandoned--and in fact sometimes are because "doctors see themselves as healers, trained to cure or ameliorate illness, and typically view the impending death of a patient as a personal failure. Rather than face failure, they abandon the patient." As a consequence, Brody put forward a surprising suggestion:
Patients may be able to help themselves in this respect by reassuring the doctor. “I know you tried very hard and I appreciate all you did for me,” they might say. “It’s not your fault that I won’t survive this disease. It would help a lot, though, if you stay with me for the long haul.”
In this suggestion Brody echoes the sad central idea--as I take it--of Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman argues that those who are visibly different from the norm--cripples, the wheelchair-bound, those with birthmarks or scars, Tourette Syndrome, the hugely obese, the ragged poor--so upset us normals that we have trouble responding to them as human, and so they, in addition to suffering their handicap, must also try to find ways to make us feel better about it and them.
I know of only two "authentic" ways for us normals to behave toward the visibly damaged. The first is exemplified for me by Bob Hope, who used to enter hospital wards of wounded G.I.s, calling out, "Don't bother to get up!" The second is exemplified by Gary Trudeau, who recently--working on his comic strip, yes, but also for personal reasons--spent a lot of time in the wounded ward in Walter Reed Army Hospital. He learned that the first thing he should say to the soldiers he met was "How did it happen?" He told a reporter they couldn't wait to tell him.
These thoughts come to me because in the last week I've learned of the death of a former student, Hal Rothman, at 47, of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. Hal, who had made himself the historian of Las Vegas (he taught at the University of Nevada there), generously, heroically, tried to make us feel better about his suffering, short life, and demise. "Truthfully, I got 47 perfect years," he told his university's magazine last summer, soon after he taught his last course. "Everything broke my way. That's a hell of a lot more than most people get. The gods reached down and put ideas in my head. Even better, they let them come out my fingers--and at a pretty good clip. Not everybody gets that."
President Franklin Roosevelt was crippled by polio, a fact he worked mightily to overcome and, when this wasn't possible, to hide. At least once, the Secret Service men standing at his shoulders and helping him move forward in a slow approximation of a walk while onlookers cheered didn't prevent him tripping, and he fell, like a tree, unbending, right on his face. Everyone gasped in horror. The sound that broke the spell was Roosevelt's bitter voice: "Clean me up, boys." In this instance FDR, unlike Hal, didn't make people feel better about his fate.
The fate I’m lucky enough to suffer now is age. I give a smile and greeting to the children I see, hoping thereby to encourage them to think that life is good, even for the old, and that there is nothing to fear. I think this one of the few useful things we old get to do.
Hal Rothman and his wife, Lauralee
