Love

Turns out it's a lot of what you need

I am struck, over and over, by the idea of hospitals as repositories for love. Of course, I admire the dedication of doctors and nurses, and I appreciate the kindness and patience we have so often been met with over the years, asking probably stupid questions, unable to work out how to transition through spaces. But what has struck me lately, as someone waiting for ward doors to be open, and standing awkwardly in corridors with other patients’ friends and relatives, is how the structure of the building hums with the love everyone feels for the people in the hospital beds.

I know that my loved one is exceptional, that his age (92) should not be an impediment to every effort to heal him. “He isn’t finished yet!” we say, over and over. He was making dinner for the family a few days ago! He has children, and grandchildren, and a great granddaughter who need him to speak again; we need his stories, his advice, his wit. We can’t keep up with the people we need to update on his progress; he is so loved. But we look around us and we see the man in the next bed, who can barely move or communicate, who is not on the list for a transfer to a rehabilitation transfer, and there they are, his children, his sisters, his grandchildren and their cousins, every single day. We are not alone in our love and our passionate need for our loved one to heal.

Over the weeks, my father is transferred out of the stroke unit onto the ward, from there to a rehabilitation facility where on the day they finally get him upright and into the gym, his heart stops and then he is moved to the emergency room of another hospital and then a ward. With each move, he is further and further away from home, and information is harder and harder to come by, but every time he is moved, we find him. The family in London, already arranging to come out to Rome in shifts so that my mother is not alone, change their tickets so that we are all together after the doctors tell us that added to the stroke, the heart attack, the history of a triple bypass and cancer and anemia and failing kidneys - on top of all that and more are embolisms on both lungs. His body is failing him, but he’s still there, it’s still him, he knows it’s still us. He reaches out for our hands because he can’t speak. He knows how loved he is, we know how loved we are.

I wish my brain had provided me with a more lyrical description, but what I feel is that we are all tentacles of the same octopus. It doesn’t matter who visits him, we are all there for each of us. The family as an entity has one purpose. And all the people we update on his progress or setbacks, who are sad for us, for him, who wish they knew what to do to make us feel better, we are buoyed by their care. We feel their love and support at our back. The people we don’t know, who still reach out, who notice. All of this adds to a groundswell, the strength of a current keeping us going.

We’re in limbo¹. Is my father dying? But he’s still here. His body is dissolving, disappearing, letting go, but he is not. He was famous for his wit, his speeches, and now he’s all but silenced. He was always the loving patriarch, flawed of course, but always doing his utmost, always filling our lives with unconditional love and engaged interest - and now he can smile at us and hold our hands and put up with our grief, that he always wanted to take on himself so that we wouldn’t feel it. He can’t save us from this, but we wouldn’t feel it if we didn’t love him so much, so we can’t wish it away.

I’ll take all the love I can get right now. The driving force of our family’s love, our friends who are right here with us, the colleague who pulls me into a hug every time she passes me, even the incidental love of a child who walks into the artroom and leans against me in the doorway without knowing why I need that, even their sigh of happiness that we are painting today is balm for my soul.

1. On Tuesday, the doctors told us he had days left. On Friday, they said he could be home next week, and we are clinging to that hope. I do have a fantasy that we will be sitting around on his 97th birthday, laughing about the time we thought he was on deathbed.