Sometimes (see yesterday) it is no kitchen-party, it is the Intensive Treatment Unit – and a decision has been agreed: to see if the patient (beloved) can sustain their own breathing. You sit beside them, and you wish there were something more original and caring you could do for them than hold their hand, but at this point, in this place, with this little opportunity for wit, originality is no longer a valued value, and care is all that counts. If you really care, you will care well; if you don’t care to care, you will dismay and possibly distress and definitely dishonour a dying person. (I have switched from the metaphor I intended to writing about Leigh’s father’s time in Frimley Park Hospital, his recovery, release, but then his second time. There he was, in his ITU bed, and there his family was, shuttling in and out (in pairs) from the Waiting Room. Take a Break magazine set aside.) Novels have Waiting Rooms, too; I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent to holding their hand as they die. It’s more like reaching inside their chest cavity and trying to restart their heart by mashing it in your fist. Come on, you fucker. The surrounds of a novel, or any ailing book, are not hospital-neutral. They are not pale blue, branded and wipeable. They’re the velvet curtains of blood, the William Morris wallpaper of the lymph nodes, the cream brown cram of the guts. I have had enough of hospitals. I have stayed too long in Waiting Rooms. I want my two-year-old son on my shoulders on the highest point of the South Downs on the first sunny day of the year – even if that’s in January – and I want him to be surveying what’s around him with a wild and giddy amazement. (Vision Creation Newsun.) And I want a one-hundred-year warranty on his heart and other major organs, and that goes for all other dolphins, too – and a few thousand spare worlds for us to share. Up on the Downs.
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