'Tell Me That I Have to Die'

Too many deaths and near-deaths of late. What a silly thing to say, as though the cessation of life should be evenly distributed according to some algorithm of happiness. Consider a friend, a former newspaper colleague in upstate New York. Her first marriage ended in divorce – a sort of death. Her second husband, a friend of mine, died miserably of multiple sclerosis more than twenty years ago. She thought she had lost her third husband last weekend – diabetes, multiple coronary and circulatory problems, massive nose bleeds, a premature release from the hospital. 

W.H. Auden’s father, Dr. George Auden, was a physician, and he often expressed interest in medicine and respect for good doctors. In the posthumously published Thank You, Fog (1974), in a section titled “Shorts,” Auden offers his comic vision of the ideal physician:

 

“Give me a doctor partridge-plump,

Short in the leg and broad in the rump,

An endomorph with gentle hands

Who'll never make absurd demands

That I abandon all my vices

Nor pull a long face in a crisis,

But with a twinkle in his eye

Will tell me that I have to die.”  

 

Bluntness, when honest and well-informed, is never hurtful. I’ve had too many doctors who euphemize and pussy-foot and deliver what they think are pep talks, which leave me feeling worse. I once had a Syrian cardiologist with whom I could discuss Shakespeare (“that in Aleppo once . . .”). I actually looked forward to seeing him. He never patronized me. In 1969, Auden published “The Art of Healing,” dedicated to his recently dead personal physician and friend, Dr. David Protetch. In the ninth stanza he writes:

 

“For my small ailments

you, who were mortally sick,

prescribed with success:

my major vices,

my mad addictions, you left

to my own conscience.”

 

I want treatment suggested, not mandated. His touch must be simultaneously light and authoritative – one of several reasons why I prefer nurses to doctors. Under the entry for “Medicine” in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970),  Auden writes:

 

“I can remember my father, who was a physician, quoting to me when I was a young boy an aphorism by Sir William Osler: ‘Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of his disease.’ In other words, a doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.”