The Home and The Heart, part VI

तुम जो सोचो वो तुम जानो हम तो अपनी कहते हैं
देर न करना घर जाने में वरना घर खो जायेंगे

You are wise perhaps, but I will speak my own truth
Do not be late in coming, or your home will be no more.

किन राहों से दूर है मंज़िल कौन सा रस्ता आसाँ है
हम जब थक कर रुक जायेंगे औरों को समझायेंगे

Which paths lead nowhere, and which paths lead to home
Weary from our own journey, we shall teach others.

Chapter 6

The Way Home

Every day was a day of hope for her, that today at last I would take her home.  But every day, her hopes were dashed.  The hospital was ready to send her away but not to home.  Instead, they insisted, and I reluctantly agreed, that she should go to another kind of hospital, where she could undergo intensive therapy.

They scheduled her departure on a Saturday, and there were some delays in the paperwork.  It was possible that she had to stay for another few days.  I would not, could not, accept that.  I knew that she was at the end of her tether, and she would not, could not, bear me again telling her that she could not leave.  That would crush her spirit, perhaps irrevocably.  In her fragile mind, she now had a hazy idea that it was now only a matter of another day.  On Thursday, and on Friday, she said: “Today is the day, right?  We are going to go, right?”

I made dozens of calls, to her insurance, to the hospitals, to her case manager, to her attendants, and made the paperwork move through.  Everything was ready, but the hospital was not able to arrange an ambulance for her to leave.  But I would not let her stay in that building for another day, even if that meant I had to carry her in my arms.

And I did.  I carried her, and had her sit in our car, and she looked at the outside world with surprise as we drove to the rehabilitation facility.

Her brain swelling had receded, but there were strange headaches.  She was frightened at what must have been extremely unpleasant sensations as her brain tried to rewire itself.

The rehabilitation center was a little more peaceful than the hospital.  She had her first bath in over a month.  She finally was able to wear her own clothes.  But durations and times were not easy for her to understand.  She was left despondent as I parted from her every evening.

The emotions of being confined to hospital rooms, with little understanding of the reasons of that confinement, were building up in her.  She had left one hospital for another.  Where was her home?  Would she ever leave these rooms with the nurses and the doctors and the therapists and the unpalatable food?  Would her headaches ever end?  Would her husband ever be with her for the night?

The cover of clouds had shifted, but a ferocious tempest was building up on the horizon.  Occasionally, and out of nowhere, there were downpours.  Oh look, there was a glimmer of the sun, but the swirling clouds soon eclipsed it again.  Without warning, the winds howled and then died down.  There were distant flashes of lightning, and the birds who were protecting their nests trembled at every sound of thunder.  Would they survive the storm?

It was a Saturday.  Like any other day, I drove to the rehab hospital to be with her.  As I entered the room, she was lying on her side, with what seemed like a smile.  But it was not a smile.  Her face was tense with emotion.  She had been waiting for me for what was to her an eternity.  She had waited and waited, and hours had passed, and days had passed, and years had passed, and I had not come.

She saw me in front of her - and exploded without warning. That entire hospital was filled with a feeble woman’s screams.  She would not stay there for another moment.  She would crawl, if she could not walk.  Her bed had guardrails, but she was ready to jump over them.  

She had been away from her home, and untold and unintelligible brutalities and indignities had been heaped on her during this time.  Who were all these people who had ravaged her body?  Why was she, the apple of her father's eye, allowed to be naked and needled in front of strange men?  What had they done to her?  What had happened?  Where was she?  Why had she, the gentle flower, been plucked and plucked till nary a petal remained?  Was there anyone else left in the world?  Her mother and her father, who had cared for her when she was an infant - and she was now again an infant - were millions of miles away.  Her brother and her sister were continents away.  Was it her destiny to spend night after lonely night in these impersonal rooms, in strange beds, looking at the walls?

She did not say any of these things.  She just screamed till her breath failed her.  But I knew.

The light inside of her was blazing as it rejected the confines of her cage.

The cruel hospital administrator wanted to sedate her.  When I asked him what, then, would he do when the sedation wore off, he replied nonchalantly: “We will continue the dose every twelve hours.”

I would not, not in a thousand years, allow my beloved to be put to sleep again.  She had risen from the cold, dark grave.  No one had the right to violate her dignity in this way, or to subdue her will to be free.  They had saved her life perhaps, but they had also savaged her.  She had been tortured enough.  She would not, not if I was there, have sedatives injected into her against her will.  She was feeble, and she was incoherent, but she was full of light.  She would not go into darkness again.

As I left the room momentarily to speak to someone, the nurses tried to inject her with something.  She pushed them away, saying words that still echo in my mind: “My husband will come and save me.  You wait and see.”  "My husband."  Her husband, who had taken the vows to protect her from harm.  Who she trusted to be right, her knight.  And who she depended on to care for her "in sickness and in health, until death do us part".  Who else was for her, then and there, what was now her entire world?  At that moment, I knew.  I would not, could not, let her down.  She would never regain her faith in her love if I came in but betrayed her, and allowed them to have their way.  That would have pushed her into a darkness worse than death.

I would not collaborate in extinguishing that blaze of life.

I realized that if I was not present that day, they would have sedated her, plunging her into depression, and seeing her lack of improvement, eventually refer her to a permanent facility for stroke victims.  And there she would remain, under sedation, under anti-depressants, on a wheelchair, away from all that was dear to her.

I put her clothes in a plastic bag.  I gathered her belongings, including the useless combs and hairbrushes.  I was made to sign a paper which stated the hospital was not responsible for her anymore, as I was taking her away “against medical advice.”  I did not hesitate, not for one moment, to sign that woeful document.  She would not stay in such a place where her humanity was to be treated with Alprazolam.

I did not know what we would do, and how we would manage on our own.  But I knew that was the right thing to do even if, once again, I had to carry her in my arms.  In my heart, I told her: "I will make you whole, my love.  I promise you.  Let us go."  She could not walk, nor eat, nor express herself.  But I would make that happen, I promised her in silence.  By all that was holy and good, I would make the flower that she was, bloom again.

In another hour, that tattered tender flower, which had been blown around by the thunderstorm and the winds into fearsome strange lands of wolves and snakes, of volcanos and deep gorges, found itself again in its familiar orchid.  Where the soil, the flowers, the trees, the very air, was its own.

The storm had passed.  There was a stillness and a fragrance of grace.

She was home.

She did not know then, or now.  But this song was written for her.

(to be continued)