I don't know if you've ever had a close friend to pass away. If you ever do, you will find that it doesn't take much to drum up memories of them. Yesterday, I watched a movie called Clemency with Alfre Woodard where she played the warden of a men's prison. This made me think of my friend Dizzle.
Dizzle was not a warden, she was a doctor who, for a short period of time, worked in a men's prison. One of her patients was an inmate that was terminally ill and dying. It was so clear that he was going to die that Dizzle began to advocate for a compassionate release so he could die peacefully amongst friends and family. I mean, according to Dizzle he was sick-sick that his death was guaranteed. It wasn't like he was going to get released then hop on a flight to Japan.
It's important to note that the doctors were not to know what the inmates did to land themselves in jail. Knowing may influence the quality of care they gave them. So, Dizzle didn't know what this guy did. She just knew he was very ill and thought it would be inhumane for him to die behind bars and she was pretty loud and annoying about this. If you knew Dizzle, you knew she'd make a stink until she got results. Well, the result of this campaign was someone letting it slip that her patient was in jail for child molestation. Yikes.
Dizzle was an only child who loved kids and wanted a trillion of them if possible, so to find out that she'd been advocating for someone who harmed them was devastating. I don't know if you know a lot of doctors but I went to college with a bunch. They can be a$$h@les. The other doctors took to giving Dizzle a not-so-nick nickname: Little Miss Compassion. It was a rough road for the rest of her stay.
The thing is that Dizzle was a Little Miss Compassion, 100%, and I sometimes wonder if she would have advocated for him anyway if she'd known what he did from the start. I don't know. Anyway, the movie made me think of this story...
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