This is Our Future

 

     I don't expect you to watch all of this video, since it's over an hour and sixteen minutes long. But if you do watch a significant portion of it, be forewarned- It's the last moments of a feeble old woman's life.

     Tennessee law enforcement has been getting a black eye this winter and for some damned good reasons. There was the Tyre Nichols beating death in Memphis last January and, before that, even, the one woman sex show that centered around Maegan Hall, who was sleeping with six or seven of her fellow officers behind her husband's back (that got her the sleaziest of offers from a local strip club that wants to pay her $10,000 to do two shows).

     But even those horrible and embarrassing incidents pale in comparison to what happened to poor Linda Edwards last February 5th at the hands of the Knoxville Police Department.

     I don't know what put Edwards in the hospital on February 4th but by the next day, Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center had kicked her out after she'd complained of abdominal pains and "constipation issues". She was also in a wheelchair because of what she'd claimed was a shattered ankle.

     When the cops arrived, they told her she'd have to leave, even though she was in no condition to walk. They wouldn't let her leave in the wheelchair she was in because it was hospital property. So how was the old lady supposed to walk away? Was she supposed to crawl away on her stomach in her thin scrubs?

     The hospital and the Knoxville PD didn't consider it their problem. Even when she gasped for breath. said she couldn't breathe and was going to die, in front of the hospital that'd just kicked her out, they jeered her and didn't believe her. “It’s all an act,” one of the stupid hick cops said.

     They brought not an ambulance for Linda Edwards but a paddy wagon that was too high for her to get into. Finally, after about an hour of talking about it, one cop put her in the back of his cruiser. He was on the way to the detention center when he got diverted to a traffic stop.

     When he got there, he looked in the back seat and Linda Edwards was unconscious. He took her back to Fort Sanders, the hospital that had given her the boot just minutes earlier, and that's where she died the next day. This body cam video chronicles the last sad moments of a woman's life.

     None of the jeering, indifferent cops who'd responded were charged.

     Of course.

     There's so much that's wrong with this incident its difficult to know where to begin. There's the bureaucratic indifference to a human being in danger of imminent death that the hospital didn't feel was worth even trying to prevent. Maybe it was an insurance issue and they looked at her as unprofitable "dead weight" as one cop called her.

     But it was Edwards' voice that pierced my heart, the groans of helplessness. That's my life. That's what I live with on a daily basis. That's what it's like living with someone with dementia. It's not the multiple diaper changes a day, the constant trips to the laundromat that's the worst part. 

     It's the subtraction from the person you used to know, the one you still love. With dementia, there's a certain empathy gap. I don't know what it's like having dementia and she doesn't know what it's like being me. But that makes reflexive compassion on my part more necessary than ever.

     Poor Linda Edwards never got that in the final minutes of her life. And she was 61. She was just 15 when I graduated high school in 1977. She was five years younger than Mrs. JP.

     I used to work in nursing homes when I was in my 20s and 30s and I can tell you, they're horrible places, human warehouses where we shunt the elderly when they get to be too much of a bother. And everyone waits for them to die and makes room for the next poor, doomed soul to occupy that death bed.

     I and a state agency are doing our level-level-headed best to keep Mrs. JP from going into such a place but we all know we're just delaying the inevitable. After the bad week she had, we may not be able to go to Concord, MA tomorrow with a friend of ours like we planned. And if we do go, it may very well be for the last time.

     The point I'm trying to make is that, in some important ways, I'm a failure. Men by their very nature are haunted by the fear that they're failing their loved ones. "They always think they're failing us," Mrs. Gould tells Mrs. Braddock in Cinderella Man. It's the best line in the movie because it's so true.

     And I'm a failure because I don't confront these challenges that have been unfairly thrown in our path with the grace that Mrs. JP deserves. I'm still learning as I go along because, frankly, I've never lived in this situation before. It's the worst kind of OJT there is.

     And when I watched that video of poor Linda Edwards and the jeering and indifference with which she was given in the final moments of her life, I was automatically confronted with my own failures. Mrs. JP cannot moderate her behavior. I can mine. This world is in desperate need of change. No one person can bring that about but effecting that change starts with each one of us.

     Most days, Mrs. JP cannot do better. But I can. And I will.