Portrait of a Peculiar Relationship at the End of Life
Last weekend I went to see a strange, slightly unnerving play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams. It’s a sad take on the end of life, and desperation in some lonely characters.
Olympia Dukakis plays an aging, vain, older woman who’s dying of an unnamed condition. She takes morphine injections help her “neuralgia,” and uses liquor to entertain guests and, without success, to blunt her emotional pain. A handsome young man, presenting himself as a poet and sculptor of mobiles, climbs up the hill on which rests her Italian villa.
She’s no fool and quickly learns of his moniker, “the angel of death.” It’s said he has a particular fondness for terminal, moneyed women. Still he is impoverished; he shows up essentially starving and with nearly nothing in his sack; he has not exactly benefited from his exploits.
Dying alone is scary, unbearable. So she lets him in; her fear outweighs the final compromise of being used, and touched, by a stranger seeking something in exchange.
A straight read of the play might make you think it’s the story of a man who flatters older women in exchange for shelter and food. Another take might consider the man’s need or desire to comfort, to reduce another’s pain, which might be genuine while pathologic, and the pleasure he might feel in doing so.
Hard to know what was Williams’ intention in this 1963 work. I found it intriguing.
A medical lesson?
Yes, I’d say it is, especially now as doctors may become as robots. I can’t help but think of a patient who somehow and for whatever reasons alone in the hospital at the end of life, who cannot be helped by a machine. One role of the oncologist or other familiar physician, some might say, is to be there – even if paid, “on duty” if you insist – to hold the patient’s hand when the end comes.
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