Speak for the dead.
This is just a quick drive-by for the weekend, and a short one. I don’t have much to say, but I thought people should be made aware of this:
Dying Lesbian’s Partner Denied Access To Her
This is what we’re up against, people. This is what we face if we don’t keep fighting not to let people impose their phobias and their bigotries on the important aspects of our lives. Pond had to spend those long hours before death without her family; her partner and her children were deprived of the time needed to say goodbye and let go.
I don’t want that to be me one day. I don’t want it to be my friends, or my partner. I don’t want it to be you. I don’t want it to be anyone, suffering that in an environment that’s supposed to be a place to nurture and heal - where if the body can’t be healed, one at least tries to ease the pain of those dealing with the loss.
This is what we’re facing.
And this is why we fight.
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February 24th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Well, they’d have to call the cops on me, because they would need someone with a gun to keep me out of my boyfriend’s room.
February 25th, 2008 at 3:38 am
There’s some very innocent, optimistic part of me that associates cases like this with decades past, along with gay bashings and hate crimes and police raids.
And on nights like this, when I’m confronted with reality, everything that is happy and innocent about me shrivels up into a tiny little ball of fear and hopelessness and the most anger I have felt in my life, because I can’t understand how we live in this miserable world full of that much hate.
It’s absolutely inhuman to face a worried family and tell them their loved one is dying and that they cannot even say goodbye. I hope that doctor feels it, and realizes how ugly it all is, and that their conscience suffers from it, because the ugly darkness I feel as a response is one of the few things that makes me cry at night.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
This story is very very saddening.
A similar thing happened to my great uncle, who had a partner who was dying in the hospital and when he tried to gain access to the Intesive Care Unit, he was denied because the family said that they didn’t want him in there and the family is only second to a “legal” spouse. So he proceeded to spen the next I believe 3 days in the waiting room crying, and then one sort of sympathetic nurse came and told him that he had died.
Although my great uncle was able to get inheritence from the will and all the legal things went fine, he said he would trade it all away to have had those last few days with him.