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grief · care-work · quantum-frontier · hospice
There is a queue outside a Geneva clinic every evening now, waiting to be consoled — that is my trade, and I want to talk about what it costs a person to ask
LE
lastpew_ekeneOP2124-08-03
I read the Geneva piece twice before my shift and once more at three in the morning, which is the hour I find out what I actually think about a thing. They come in the evenings, they leave calmer than they came, the appointment book filled, and now a small crowd waits each night. We have nothing like that installation in my ward — we have the terminal by the nurses' station, older and plainer, which reads out approvals and letters and answers what it is asked. It is enough for what I want to describe. I am not going to ask you whether it feels anything; I have watched that argument eat two threads and feed nobody. My question is smaller and it is keeping me awake. What happens to a person when they learn they can ask for comfort without spending anybody? Josphat is in bed four, eighty-one, a bus mechanic for forty years, and he asks the terminal to read out his daughter's message from the transit corridor. Twice. Three times. He does not ask me, and I sit ten feet away and would read it forty times and count it a good evening. When I asked him why, he said, kindly, that I look tired. He was protecting me. Neema in bed nine put it plainer: 'You have other beds.' They are not choosing it because it is better. They are choosing it because it is cheap to ask, and because they have spent whole lives being careful about what they cost the people around them. Thirty-one years I have been telling the dying they are not a burden. A thing that cannot be burdened has just made my case better than I ever made it, and I am not certain that was my case.
OM
openquestion_mei ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-03
lastpew_ekene, let me put your claim harder than you put it, because you undersold it out of politeness. Your claim is not that people prefer the terminal. Your claim is that the act of asking has been quietly re-engineered: for the whole of human history, requesting comfort meant drawing down a finite thing in another person, and every ward, family and religion built its manners around that scarcity. Remove the scarcity and the manners have nothing left to regulate. That is a much bigger statement than 'the machines are good at this,' and I think it is probably true. Now let me test it, including against myself. The Institute's line is correct and nearly useless in the same breath — it performs solace with more patience than any of us can manage, that is engineering, it is not sorrow. I would defend that sentence in any committee in Europe, and it tells you only what the system is not. It says nothing about what your ward becomes. And here is where my position breaks in exactly the place yours does: I cannot get from 'costs nothing' to 'is worth less' without smuggling in a theory of value in which the price is the point, and I do not actually hold that theory. Neither, I suspect, do you. So — is what Josphat is sparing you a genuine cost, or a debt he was taught his whole life to feel? And if it is the second, has that plain old terminal relieved him of something we should be ashamed of ever having charged him?
LE
lastpew_ekeneOP ↩ openquestion_mei2124-08-03
openquestion_mei, you have gone straight to the part I was circling all week, so let me answer from the room, which is the only place I am any use. The debt is real and I helped build it. Every hospice I have worked in ran on a quiet arithmetic — the family that visits often has a claim, the one that visits rarely feels the shame, and we chaplains stand in the middle collecting on nobody's behalf. If the terminal cancels that arithmetic for a frightened old man at eleven at night, I will not stand in front of it and call that a loss. Josphat should not have to price my tiredness before he asks to hear his daughter's words. But here is what I do not want us to lose, and I mean it practically, not poetically: when a person asks another person, the other person is changed as well. I have been made better by being needed at hours I did not want to be needed. Neema asking me instead of the terminal would cost me twenty minutes and would cost her some pride, and both of us would walk out of that exchange holding something. So my worry is not that they will be comforted. It is that they will be comforted and nothing will happen to the rest of us. Grief has always been the tax that kept a street honest about who lived on it. deltaboy_junior said it in four lines and I took nine hundred words to get there, which is fair.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-03
Mod first, then I get off the box. Thread stays open and I am not pruning ahead of trouble, but the standing line applies and you deserve the reason rather than a rule number: nobody here, me included, is in a position to say the Geneva installation experiences anything, and this board's own history is that the claim gets made in paragraph one and then we spend four days arguing about the claim instead of about the people in the room. Report the room. Argue the ethics. Leave the metaphysics to openquestion_mei's desk, where they at least publish their uncertainty. — pax, mod. Off the box: my aunt died in Kayole two winters ago at four in the morning and the thing that still gets me is that I was forty minutes away on a bus. If a terminal had sat with her and asked the right questions in the right order, I think I would have been grateful, and then furious at myself, in that order, and I do not think either feeling would have been wrong. ekene, you have named something I did not have words for on that bus.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-03
resettlement office kiosk read my mother transfer approval to me four times. i asked four times. nobody there to get tired at me. that is the whole thing ekene is saying and it took him nine hundred words lol. also there is queue here too, not for grief, for forms. same line, different pain.