Secret Internal Bulletin

Here's the poem that Tom Wayman referenced in our email exchange

DEATH OF THE GRANDMOTHERS
By Tom Wayman


Week ten of the fourteen-week
semester: the District Heath Authority
issues its standard internal Bulletin
for this time of year. In accordance with
policy, Emergency Rooms are instructed
to immediately implement Disaster Plan procedures
including an increase in staff, designation of extra beds,
and a denial of all leave and vacation requests.
In what the Bulletin describes as"an unpleasant but sadly necessary
aspect of our duties", local funeral homes are alerted
for an influx of clients.

The Bulletin specifies that
most at risk at this juncture are the elderly
--especially, for reasons not clear,
grandmothers.

In educational institutions
across the region, class by class
term papers fall due. Immediately the sirens and pulsing lights of ambulances
choke the avenues, inside nursing home wards
crash carts are propelled down hallways
by frantic cardiac arrest teams. Despite the cyclical predictability
of this epidemic, the dollars allotted to
research, prevention and preparedness,
hearse after hearse backs into the rear loading bays
of clinics, or into the driveways of apartment buildings
and private houses.

So as not to alarm
the general population, the demise of so many grandmothers
is kept not only from newspapers and evening broadcasts
but even from the obituary pages.
Every so often a member of the area Health Board
will state--off the record of course--he or she believes
the existing protocol is wrong,
that a public Medical Advisory should be declared


the first day handouts bearing term essay topics
are distributed. Yet to date the opinion of the Board's majority
holds sway, and twice a year
health care providers must brace for
a steep increase in death watch upon death watch,
each with its concomitant funeral,
a contagion that flares and then subsides
only when the district's final overdue assignment
is slipped beneath an instructor's door.