The Home and The Heart, part IV

“The strength and the beauty of a tender leaf is its vulnerability to destruction. Like a blade of grass that comes up through the pavement, it has the power that can withstand casual death.”

Chapter 4

The Compliment

We had once been to Africa.  As we were waiting to board a flight from Addis Ababa, a middle-aged woman next to my wife told her: “What beautiful long hair you have.  These are priceless.”

On the CVICU bed, as that oft-complimented woman struggled to breathe, and as her brain swelling showed as yet no sign of abating, her very same beautiful long hair, unwashed for many weeks had irreversibly matted and tangled.  They had become impossible to handle.  The nurses would try, and fail.  They wanted to save her hair, as they could do nothing to save her.  The doctors were in charge of her ebbing life, but the nurses, in their simple kindness, were alarmed about her hair.

The days passed.  Slowly the drugs being pumped into her were dialed down.  She was stabilizing.  She had started murmuring and had nodded when I told her that it was me, her husband and lover who was holding her hand.

Often, she would take my hand and place it against her left cheek, and close her eyes.

She was unaware of what had transpired, and of what was happening to her.  She could not understand the doctors, nor make sense of what the nurses asked her.  She probably remembered that she had been wheeled into a large room and that strange tall men had put needles into her and one of them had wiped her chest and sternum in preparation for something brutal, and after that it was all dark for her.

Her face had darkened considerably.  She had become a pale shadow of her glowing self that attracted glances and compliments in malls and in gyms and in airports.  And as therapist after therapist visited her, she was found unable to speak or stand or to drink a drop of water.  But there were some rays of light through the clouds now.  She was now breathing on her own, and her heart, massively traumatized, was beating feebly but regularly, assisted by the pacemaker.

The days passed.  The swelling of her brain was not worsening. She had started mumbling a few words.  But often uttered something which was completely oblique to what I believed and knew she meant to say.  I understood many of her expressions, but the nurses had given up on communicating with her.  The nurses were trying hard, but they had to attend to many patients, and I was her nurse most of the time when I was there.  My wife did not know that she was in an American hospital, and continued to mumble words in Punjabi.

When I was away from her, I would call on the CVICU room phone, the nurse would hand her the handset, and as my wife listened to me telling her that I loved her, she would mumble back in broken words.  She wanted me to come back to her, and soon, as she was all alone in the strange big building and nothing made sense to her.  And I would promise, and she probably waited and waited and drifted to sleep, in pain and in loneliness.  I could only be with her a few hours a day, due to the Covid restrictions.  I was with her in my thoughts, but it was a pain almost too great to bear to be away from her when she needed me the most.

And when I was with her for the few hours during the day, she would ask me to speak to "them".  She wanted to know something, but I did not know what.  Did she want me to ask them to let her go home?  She would try and try to tell me and finding it impossible to come up with the words, give up in sadness and in tears.

I brought her a mirror to look into.  And she would hold the mirror in front of her, unable to make sense of what she was seeing. 

Was this she, the one who was complimented by strangers in far-off lands?  What had happened to her long, flowing hair?  She would look at me, and I would attempt to brush her hair and soothe her.

But the days passed, and she remained critical.  She continued to be in the CVICU for days and weeks.  Her heart was unable to beat on its own, and another surgery was planned to give her an adaptive pacemaker inside her left shoulder.

At this point, she was in almost total surrender.  She did not complain about the immense pain, about the incessant needling, at the multiple heparin injections in her stomach, at the beeping, at the noisy turbine in the room, at the strange sensations inside her head and in her chest, at her soiled bed sheets, …  She had no idea what was happening to her.  She was being fed through a tube, and was not in control of her bodily functions.  She was unaware that the doctors were planning to cut her up again to implant the pacemaker.  That again she would be sent into the total darkness of general anesthesia.  She was often at peace.

And one day, with covid rules and time and clocks being a cognitive burden too great for her injured brain, and after waiting for interminable agonizing hours for her beloved husband to be with her as he promised her on the phone every night, unable to understand why he went away, she finally told him, through tears and unbearable pain, in words that must have come from a deep reserve of some lingering language abilities in her bleeding left-brain, that he need not come anymore, that she was now with God.

…

Faced with a calamity beyond their powers to address, the tender are strong, because they do not resist.  Their strength is in the acceptance of their fate.  They place their trust in God, and often they find that God does not answer back.  But they still trust.  They will let life take its course, and they have faith that life and the Gods will not let them drown.  And if no help comes, that that is the will of God, and they will perish in peace.  When faced with an utter inability to change their state of affairs, the ones who surrender in silence are stronger than those who flail and struggle.

(to be continued)