Volume 196 - Issue 6
In my darkness
Med J Aust 2012; 196 (6): 413-414. || doi: 10.5694/mja12.10362
Published online: 2 April 2012
Published online: 2 April 2012
Every morning I wake just to hear him get up and head for the bathroom.
Somewhat later, I wake up again. I hear him leave the bathroom and go down the stairs. Slowly. No reason to rush. Like on thin ice of a lake, one step after another. Just to make it to the other side.
When I wake again, I know it’s time for him to leave the kitchen. He does.
I can hear the clonking of the dishes as he clears the table, and then the door slightly creaks. Steps across the hallway. Another creaking door opens and closes. He’s in the lounge: it’s time for the news. Later, after I have finally emerged from my bedroom, he will enumerate to me the famous people who died last night.
But now I fall back to sleep and continue along twisting hospital corridors, through half-open hospital rooms. I burst into one after another. Where is she? She was here just a second ago, just then, before I woke up! I look for her in the empty beds and gurneys. Sometimes I find her. But she’s there less and less often. They say it is normal. She will be nearest for the first six months. And then not.
I am still in my dream, bubbled in, when the phone starts.
He pretends he cannot hear it.
It rings for a few minutes. When it ceases, I know there have been too many interruptions and I will no longer meet her today. Leaving behind the rusty twilight of the corridors, I struggle out of bed.
When I see him, we both choose not to mention the phone. In an undertone, we make remarks about recent political unrest in some faraway countries. “What will it be?” we ask, trying to avert eyes from her picture on the left, just by the vase with pansies.
Then it’s the phone again. We knew we would not be able to get away for long. It is now like some new law of nature. They ring us. A procession of acquaintances, friends and relatives. They check on us, give advice we never asked for, enquire about our daily routine. Some of them behave like they are bringing a special message. They say, “She came to me in a dream last night. She looked well. Your mother looked happy”. I know they mean unlike that day in the chapel, supine and dressed up by foreign hands from the funeral home because it is no longer our tradition to prepare our loved ones ourselves for their last journey.
They tell me things as if they were some long forgotten details. What a great nurse she was. Not the fastest but so well organised that she’d always finish everything before everyone else. How patients wanted her to be their nurse. How they said, “Sister, I hope you are making my injections today”. And how she stayed in a boarding house and was afraid of mice.
“I know, I know”, I answer. But what I really want is to be able to smell her hair. I go and sniff her pillow, but every day the scent becomes vaguer and vaguer.
“Why don’t you answer, this is your house now”, my father tells me.
The phone angrily buzzes as I walk out of the room.
When he isn’t there, I sieve through clutter assembled on her side of their bed. There is a small urn with ambers, because they’re supposed to take away any pain you have. I try warming up a few golden pebbles in my hands but everything stays the same. There is also a basket with dried petals for better sleep. I sneak them out to my room — if I could dream for longer, I might get to see her more often. Then there is a porcelain elephant with a lifted trunk. It seems incredible that it’s no longer needed. I catch him dusting it when he thinks I’m out.
I too wait. I feel that if only I could stay motionless for long enough, she will change her mind and come back. “The human was not meant for inaction”, voices in the receiver tell me. “To survive, one needs to keep busy. This is the only way.”
In the evenings, we sit in front of the TV. He dozes off and wakes up to the sound of his own snoring. I work through a pile of photocopies from my Anatomy colouring book. Over and over again, like a madman, I colour the brain, the parts that failed her when we needed them to work. The parts where the blood leaked out and gave her a big scare, and neither of us were with her. The parts that gave her such a headache. The headache so big that they call it “thunderclap”. Like a loud clap of some large hands from above to announce that your time has come.
Days are always fine. It’s like she went to work. At night I’m back in there again, when we hovered at her ICU bed like scared birds whose hatchling had fallen out of the nest. “Let us leave her rosary in case she wakes up when we aren’t there.” “Let us leave her some cookies in case she wakes up hungry.” “And the eyeglasses, why didn’t we think of that, if she wakes up and cannot see, she’ll be petrified.”
One morning I fall asleep to wade through the brown dusk of a cave. I feel she’s somewhere around, but cannot tell her apart from the other silhouettes that populate it. They corner me in and stare. Then they drag me inside a cube as dark as a fucking Rosetta Stone: “You have to stay here. You are not meant to wander around”.
I fight them tooth and nail. I will not be locked up! Never will it happen! The muddy darkness around me shifts with uncertainty, and then I feel her by me and can smell her hair. As if I had any bargaining power, I declare, “I will stay put as long as I have to, providing she holds my hand through all this time”. It is allowed. They put me in the cube but I get to clutch my fingers around hers. I sit in complete darkness. My senses tell me nothing except that my hand is out there with her, in a brownish grotto.
“I don’t even get to dream”, he says when I tell him.
They ask me about my dreams. I fear they will be like him, a bit envious of my little dark box. “I wish there was something to tell”, I reply.
Kilometres of footpaths daily.
I know he is trying to remember. He had no way of tearing her away from the cold claws of the other side; he had no way of stopping her from slipping through, all blue on her lips, and face, and arms. But now he will save her. He will pick up every memory of her that lingers in the parks and cul-de-sacs, pin the pieces together and turn them over in his head so many times that they will finally hold strong. He will close his eyes when the spring wind blows from the mountains, and she will be in it just the same as years ago when he would meet her on her way back from work, shivering from cold in an unbuttoned trench coat. He will listen to footsteps echoing on the pavement; a slightly uneven gait, yes, just like hers when she was in a hurry. He will labour like an ant in the infinity of mazes; he will not forego any avenue, will check every nook, collect every grain of sand and drag it back home.
The doctors may have had to let her go, and it was not up to him to do anything. But this is the part that rests in his hands. And this time it will be different. She will not end as long as he goes on.
I sometimes see him meandering around alleys of the cemetery and trails of neighbouring hills. I now know it. We are both dragging our own stones on our own ropes attached to our own necks. These are our private stones; we will guard them with our lives. Only we and no one else can rid us of them.
When I look at him through the knots of twigs and their fresh sprouts, I know he sees me. He knows I see him. We gently alter our routes so that they don’t intersect.
I close my eyes and test how far I can walk without seeing. In the darkness I create.