Rizpah

This evening as I looked out on the fields from the second floor of the nursing home where I work, I saw in the fading sunlight a circle of vultures sitting around a dark object lying in the windrows of freshly mown hay. As they converged a doe came out from the trees at the edge of the field to drive them back. This little dance continued. Because there was once a time in my life when I worked in hayfields, I have little difficulty visualizing the fawn that hid in the tall grass until it was too late to escape the sickle bar of the mowing machine and now shorn of its legs it will not live through the night.

I cry out for young ones cut down in the spring of their lives. I cry out for mothers who grieve for them as they die. I cry out also for my 90 year old patient whose leg is dying and who will die with it, and for my 98 year old patient with pneumonia whose life began in Poland, who as a young woman worked the sweatshops in Brooklyn, whose children and grandchildren became doctors and lawyers and business people, and who asks me tonight how my children are rather than complain about her own situation. I cry out against death and dying, but in the end I know the vultures will come.