The Lay of the Land

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Last week, I read in the Asbury Press a story that has come to sting me like a nettle. In one sense, it was the usual kind of news item we read every a.m., feel a deep, if not a wide, needle of shock, then horror about, stare off to the heavens for a long moment, until the eye shifts back to different matters — celebrity birthdays, sports briefs, obits, new realty offerings — which tug us on to other concerns, and by mid-morning we’ve forgotten.

But, under the stunted headline TEX NURSING DEATHS, the story detailed an otherwise-normal day in the nursing department at San Ysidro State Teachers College (Paloma Playa campus) in south Texas. A disgruntled nursing student (these people are always men) entered a building through the front door, proceeded to the classroom where he was supposed to be in attendance and where a test he was supposed to be taking was in progress — rows of student heads all bent to their business. The teacher, Professor Sandra McCurdy, was staring out the window, thinking about who knows what — a pedicure, a fishing trip she would be taking with her husband of twenty-one years, her health. The course, as flat-footed, unsubtle fate would have it, was called “Dying and Death: Ethics, Aesthetics, Proleptics”—something nurses need to know about.

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