Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's spare, compact, and provocative play Rockaby (1981) is a study in old age, isolation, and disengagement from life. In it, an elderly woman rocks in a chair while the audience hears a distant voice remembering her lifelong search for human contact or communion. The play dramatizes the woman's intense physical and psychological isolation and the last sputterings of her impulse to narrate. Such radical isolation may be a necessary precondition for a person relinquishing the narrating that Beckett equates with being, and surrendering unto death. Despite its apparent simplicity, the play powerfully explores the nature of aging in contemporary society, quality-of-life issues for the frail, solitary elderly in our communities and health-care institutions, and how the elderly prepare for life's end in a death-denying culture. Rockaby is thus a text that can help clinicians and other caregivers appreciate the predicament of solitary elderly persons nearing life's end and better understand how we all must manage one day the lonely, self-abnegating yet also paradoxically self-assertive act of dying.
The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.
Alone.
-Beckett, Company (1980)
IN OUR UNIVERSITY'S INTERNAL MEDICINE CLINIC, resident physicians care for a woman we will call Ophelia Johnson. Seventy-seven years old, Mrs. Johnson has a long list of chronic medical problems that require her to take, at last count, 12 different medications each day. Her husband died of lung cancer 13 years ago. Her only child, a son, lives in Montana. At different times since Mrs. Johnson was widowed, her son has encouraged her to come live with him, but she has declined this offer.Mrs. Johnson has resided in central Virginia her entire life.Now, with her small pension and meager savings, she lives alone in a small trailer park on the edge of town.
Six months ago, she was admitted to our hospital with pneumonia. The ward team urged her to go to a nursing home or move in with her son so she could have help with the activities of daily living. She refused, and after a course of antibiotics was...