Bed 12 by Alison Murdoch

Author:Alison Murdoch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hikari Press
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

WEEK FOUR

VIGIL

CHAPTER 18

Odysseus and Penelope

I’ve now spent three weeks—or over 200 hours—watching my nearest and dearest navigate a private world that nobody else can access or interpret. To start with his only movement was the regular rise and fall of the chest as life-giving air was pumped in and out—a rhythmic process, powered by machines, which doesn’t seem to qualify as breathing. More recently he has been thrashing about like an imaginary warrior who is fighting for his life. Meanwhile the rest of ICU carries on all around us. Shifts begin and end, shadows shorten and lengthen, and patients come and go, either to recover and transfer to other wards, or to lose the fight for life and pass into the next world.

Images from myth and fairy tales come to mind. Simon’s spirit is absent, gone on a long and dangerous journey from which he may never return. I imagine him stranded on a distant shore, stuck at the bottom of a deep well or lost in a dark forest. Hospital wards, particularly ICU, are designed to keep killer germs at bay and in the process everything soft, comfortable and familiar is scrubbed and hot-rinsed away. Why would Simon be drawn back to this environment, I wonder? What can I do, as his beloved wife, his Penelope, to give him a stronger incentive to return?

We have already started with sound. Sound is the most basic and primeval of the sense objects, as St John (and many of the Tibetan classic texts) knew well: “In the beginning was The Word.” Sound is also free and one of the few things that, within reason, the patient’s family can bring into this stark environment. Bed 12 has a shelf alongside it and I have been allowed to commandeer the space on top of the shelf for “a few CDs.” I bring new music each morning from our extensive home collection and take the equivalent number of CDs away each evening, making an effort to keep the music library down to about 30—a reasonable number, I tell myself.

In my role as Simon’s personal DJ I select appropriate tracks for each phase of the day and leave a small pile of soothing albums by the bedside for overnight use. My most regular tracks are Gregorian chant, Palestrina and Bach, or else sitar, oud and qawalli music from India, Pakistan and the Middle East. My instinct is to avoid anything emotional such as Brahms and Beethoven, or the noisy Romany brass bands, Bartok, and Ligeti we’ve enjoyed together over the years. Various friends deliver favourite CDs to the hospital or offer to put together special compilations. The most common suggestions are to play Mozart and Pachelbel’s Canon, both of which he particularly dislikes. That won’t bring him back to us! Our singer-friend Carolina Herrera has made a recording of Spanish and Colombian ballads which I play so often that the CD wears out. She happens to be working as a doctor at St Thomas’ this same

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