Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance, one of the many reasons I have come to deeply dislike gay comrade Tony Kushner's play is that its central character is a man with AIDS who has been abandoned by his cowardly lover. I lived through those years, awful years, and far far more often I saw men standing by their partners til death parted them.
I have spent a week at my parents house, watching my mother care for my father, who is dying slowly of dementia. Both in their mid-80's, they require and have a lot of help, but after her initial shock and anger and resentment over how was disappearing right in front of her, she has become a constant and compassionate and untiring mate to the man she married almost six decades ago. He is mostly gone already, a shadow of his former self in a shell of his former self. And she is still there. When I told her how much I admired her for all this, she simply said, "What else can I do?"
My favorite uncle died a few weeks ago. And again, his wife nursed him through his slow decline, keeping her promise that he would die at home in his own bed. Now she is alone in their big house. What must that be like?
These are the angels in America.
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