"Let Me Down Easy"

Ann Deavere Smith, a journalist, an artist, a wise woman and her play
if you haven seen it--do yourself a favor--perhaps one of the most important things you can do for yourself--go.

Life - death - how we do everything we can, as a society, to mask it, distance it, keep it from touching us too deeply or else we may very well have to accept our mortality, and moreover, our morality.

In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight she Smith said about her art form, "I wear the words." What greater tribute can she give to another human being, indeed, to humankind?

Some of the 20 people she spoke the words of in her play (out of the hundreds she interviewed over years and in three continents) who reverberate through my body are:

• Ruth Kaz, the patient, who is wise enough to know to have someone there when she has her chemo treatments, someone who will make sure she is getting the correct chemo in the correct dosage. Oh yes, we know not to trust that it will be done correctly.
• Brent Williams, the rodeo bull rider from Idaho, who is wise enough to know that there is something very wrong with this country's medical system if he can go to a veteran's hospital with severe damage to his liver from being stepped on by a two ton bull and the doctor there hears him when he says don't take it all out, so he doesn't and just takes the damaged part and for the standard hospital rate for all operations, $1200. Brent knows how fortunate he was for being taken to that hospital because anywhere else, it's standard practice to take it all out and charge the patient and insurance company everything they can get. He says something like when doctors don't make big money, and insurance companies are not in control, then we will have doctors who listen and care that considers the individual's needs. Amen.
• Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, Physician at Charity Hospital, New Orleans, who during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina is confronted by the reality of this country's shameful secret that not all people are valued the same. She has to admit to herself something her patients and nurses already knew, help was not coming for them, even days after everyone
• who "counts" is rescued, and they had only to rely on themselves, and they did.

I could go right down the list, but then, their words through Ann are much to precious to try to paraphrase. Someday there will be a script that I can read and reread, "wear the words," and be reminded how closely they fit--and I look at my story, my blog that holds a part of it now, and say to myself, please, just "let me down easy."