Not a woman or a dog? Dodge the awkward hospital visits then!
IF Jim hadn’t had surgery, I’d never have seen the magpies. And that would have been a loss.
When Jim told me of the operation I said I’d be delighted to drive him to hospital on knife day. And that on escape day I’d be equally delighted to come and collect him. But in the intervening recuperation days, would he excuse me if I didn’t ...
Visit? he said.
Visit, I said.
Of course, he said.
I doubt I’m alone is hating hospital visiting. If one’s son or daughter, wife or husband, mother or father is laid out on hospital sheets then that is a simple imperative, a familial fiat. One goes on the instant, without doubt or hesitation. But beyond those precisely defined limits it feels optional to me and I opt out.
It’s not that I don’t like hospitals. I find them endlessly interesting. They are cities populated by those who’ve drawn a shorter straw than I, who’ve been hit by one of the bullets I’ve dodged. Though dodged is quite the wrong verb. Dodging is just taking credit for the bullets having missed. So far.
A hospital’s where we store the events we prefer to pretend don’t happen. But to step inside is to be forced to stop pretending, for there the events are everywhere you look, impossible to disavow, in the waiting rooms, the corridors, the passing trolleys, the wheelchairs, the wards glimpsed through swinging doors. It’s fierce grim viewing, intensely interesting.
But the actual visiting, the bringing of grapes or flowers — tokens of a richly flourishing world beyond the walls — the sitting by the bed, the searching for something to say, these things I prefer to shun. Anyone in hospital has become their medical condition. Their life has shrunk to their gall bladder, their stent. There is only one subject of discussion. The rest is piffle, persiflage, an transparent effort to skirt around the subject. A single question hangs in the air beside every bed: ‘‘how are you?’’ And tagged on to its tail is a single rejoinder: ‘‘sick.’’ So there is no point in speech. But we find silence awkward and we fall back on kind dishonesties.
Women visit better than men, far better. They don’t try to joke. They aren’t shy to touch. And they don’t want to toy with the medical paraphernalia, or see how the hoist works.
But the best visitors of all are dogs. They can’t lie, they don’t want to speak, they aren’t affected by the suffering of others, they don’t want to know how you are and they like to be stroked. They lend the patient a chance to give instead of take.
A friend whose father was in a dementia ward used to borrow a placid old dog of mine when she went to visit him. Jessie would tour the whole ward. She got a treat or a pat from every bed, was addressed by a dozen different names and did more psychological good in half an hour than any doctor.
Anyway, I went to fetch Jim today. I took the dog because the two are fond of each other. I drove the back way, round the lowlying bit of Christchurch that was devastated by liquefaction. It’s since been cleared. The result’s extraordinary, hundreds of acres that once were suburbs have been returned to grass. The houses have been taken away, the fences. All that’s left are the more durable garden trees and shrubs and the crumbling remains of roads. Early for my rendezvous I stopped to give the dog a run.
Clouds of winter grey. Spots of rain. Air still tangy from the ocean to the east. And nobody for miles. Just the fading echoes of what had once been places where people lived, and raised families, and dodged bullets. A street sign was succumbing to entropy, 20 degrees off the vertical, its two name plates still legible but one now pointing at grass, the other at sky. Norcross Street said one, Corserland Street the other. Beside it a street lamp, and perched on its top where the pole curved over like a question mark, a pair of magpies, fat beaked bully birds.
They could see for miles from up there. They owned the place. And as the dog snuffled with delight among what once were gardens, the birds looked down on us and sang that song that only the magpies sing. It was gurgling triumph. I thought of Denis Glover. And I thought of Horace. Naturam furca expellas, wrote Horace a couple of thousand years ago, tamen usque recurret.
And I went to fetch Jim.
❛ A hospital’s where we
store the events we prefer to pretend don’t
happen❜