Rituals

Last night my husband and I were watching--dare I confess it?--the season's final episode of Nurse Jackie. We have been fans of Edie Falco for many years, but I must say the storyline has grown exceedingly tired for me, although not for my spouse.  As a recovering alcoholic, sober for thirty years, he takes a keen interest in others' struggles for sobriety, and this season we have watched Jackie reach the end of her first year, quite a triumph.  In earlier seasons she has been shown dipping into the pills in the hospital pharmacy, making out with the pharmacist, in fact, to improve her chances for gaining the access she needs.  The tension between her honest attempt to be the best possible ER nurse possible, and we see her in action plenty of times, where her intelligence, quick, sure judgement, and her boundless compassion are magnificently on display, and her need to medicate herself was indeed dramatic and moving, although I had to ask myself from my own years working in hospitals how it was she could be so always spot on in her reactions when she must have been glazed over one way or another in reaction to her little pills.  Now she is working on sobriety, an admirable goal, but I have found it tedious going.  For whatever reason she feels she has to enlist the attention and sympathies of all her friends and family, many of whom--her older daughter and her former husband--are thoroughly disgusted with her.  My feeling is go for it, Jackie, but don't tell us all about it.  It's a boring subject, your daily psychological stance vis-a-vis mood altering drugs, and if you are going to speak up, let's talk about some of the other things that must engage your obviously so intelligent mind.  My husband is disgusted with me, claims that because I have never been addicted, have not knowledge of addiction, I cannot understand her focus.  I claim no, I do understand, yes, it must be all consuming for her, something to which she must constant attention.  But do we all have to hear about the struggle?  Struggle qua struggle is not interesting.  How does this impact on Jackie's sense of life, her daily thoughts about the other people in her life?  She has become just too self-obsessed, as her daughter angrily claims often, and I am with that little fourteen year old.  Yes, shut up, Jackie.  On the other hand, toward the close of last night's program an old man dying alone of cancer tells Jackie that he was born a Catholic, and as she would know, that never leaves you, even if you leave the Church.  At last he calls for someone to give him the last rites, and asks that Jackie do this, which is evidently permissible in that religion.  She hasn't been to Mass in a long, long time, but the next scene we see her at his bedside with the book of prayer, with the water, anointing him while intoning the ritual.  I was deeply moved, as I am by all Christian ritual, atheist as I am, a holdover from my days as a serious Episcopalian altar boy.  My husband at my side, a seriously lapsed Catholic, snorted with impatience that all the people on the screen who had for very good reasons dropped the practice of their Catholic faith, and his husband next to him, a thoughtful and serious atheist, could surrender so completely to the words and gestures.  "That's what I want at the end," I said in a choked voice.  "Oh, God," he said in exasperation.