The Theater of Experience
A friend of mine is a nurse who works for a medical organization which is Hospice-adjacent.
They sometimes have patients who don’t precisely qualify for Hospice admission, but who face similar expectations for longevity, etc.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;”
— Shakespeare’s Jaques, from As You Like It
There was a woman there who was also a patient. Because of her condition, she was worried that she was going to miss out on something she’d been preparing for for years — her grand-daughter’s graduation from High School.
My friend, who never acted or directed a play in her life, stepped up. Although it would be a week or two before the official ceremony, she was going to host a graduation right there in our patient’s room. A cap and gown were obtained early. While an official diploma would have to wait, a mock one was created and signed by the high school principal. A friend stepped up to give a brief speech.
This all went down. Tassels were turned, and photographs taken.
Our patient woman was floored. A few days later, she flew from this mortal band into the spiritual sphere.
What to us might seem at all levels to be counterfeit, to her was a deeply significant and meaningful experience.
I heard a related but quite different story about a wedding.
Two people who would have otherwise had a courthouse ceremony were thinking they’d like to do something a little different.
Neither wanted an expensive or cookie-cutter wedding. While both were successful entrepreneurs, they could both think of so many better ways to invest their excess capital.
So they found an option which surprised a lot of people.
One of them had a friend who was living in a retirement community, a mentally sharp but physically deteriorating friend who was facing the likelihood of a mortality which just might gather sooner than later.
Wouldn’t he be an excellent witness at the wedding, she thought?
Soon, everything was set. A minister from the Church of Universal Life committed to the date and on a Saturday they took the retirement community’s cafeteria by storm.
A few close friends and family of the bride and groom were subsequently surrounded by about 150 retirees in residence. The friend served as Witness, which was also a sort of default best man and maid of honor, handing the rings and standing up front (and sometimes sitting down nearby) the wedding couple.
It cost them no more or less than a courthouse wedding would’ve. And it touched over a hundred lives — the lives of people who could not ordinarily experience such occasions.
Just as our grandmother’s life was touched by one nurse taking a little extra time to lead and orchestrate something.
What a magical world. To refine the point, Shakespeare’s Prospero ends The Tempest with a sonnet as a monologue.
May we all find such a fortunate fate.
“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have ’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now ’tis true
I must be here confined by you,
5 Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
10 With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
15 And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”— Prospero, The Tempest
à Bientôt,
Aaron