The silence is the most noticeable thing. It looms and swirls just beyond human comprehension. It is a caged, infrared beast seeking to reassert its dominance over the premises it rules whenever we are not in residence. I am almost too weak to keep it at bay by myself, but I do not lack weapons – I can stomp about, play music, talk to the cats or lovebirds, or listen to the television if I need assistance, but my partner in the daily struggle to keep it at bay is not here. She is in the hospital recovering from surgery, so I am left to my own inadequate devices.
I am always startled by the weight and shape of absence. It has a presence – a presence of the kind that the remainder of a rolled out sheet of cookie dough has after the cookie cutters have been fully utilized and there is no single remaining expanse large enough for one more cookie to be cut. Silent shapes remain to hint at personality, but the personality itself is absent and engaged in something you can only share in sips and snippets. These remaining shapes are transitory, quickly disappearing into the dough as soon as it is rolled up, mounded, and rolled out again for new shapes to be cut. But they somehow remain there in the new, smaller sheet of uncut dough; the weight of their absence is palpable and could be measured on an accurate scale.
I think about what she is going through, but it is beyond personal experience. I have shared in it in the sense of being present in the hospital while she was being operated on, but I cannot really relate to what she is experiencing except by imagination – an imagination impaired by the fact that I am not undergoing, and have never undergone, anything similar. While it has changed her in a way I cannot yet fully comprehend, it has also served to re-emphasize the things I know about her and love best: the ‘nobody can take me down but myself” attitude that always makes itself known in times of personal physical danger; the determined effort to heal faster through aggressive effort as evidenced by her long walks up and down the hall outside of her room while her roommate – the person who had the same surgery from the same surgeon immediately after my partner vacated the operating table – remains seated in her chair or lying in her bed and walking only when required; the sense of humor that is her best defense against pain and the poking, prodding, and sundry personal indignities suffered at the hands of nurses, therapists, doctors, dietitians, and the other mysterious beings that flit to and fro in the halls of modern hospitals only to be seen when you least expect them or want to pass through; her apologies for putting me through the discomfort of her surgery as if I had been the one on the operating table instead of her.
She is my best defense against the silence, but she is temporarily resident in a world of constant motion, light, and sound and unable to help. There she dreams with longing of the silence I dread, hoping to return soon and working as hard as she can to speed up the process. And here in the uneasy silence, I await her.
