ONE MORE HOUR
A lie-down trag(icom)edy piece.
A man is having dinner with friends. A piece of meat lodges in his throat and cuts off the oxygen supply to his brain, leaving him practically comatose. For the next 8 years, his condition remains the same. One day, the nursing home physician gives him a sedative, which provokes a paradoxical effect on him: suddenly, he is lucid again. Somehow, the drug makes the parts of his brain which are overactive as a result of his injury quiet down, while the areas linked to alertness speak up. He is able to talk to his father on the phone and even take some steps. Sadly, this miraculous “recovery” lasts only an hour before he slides back into his “normal” state.
That same year, my mom, a translator who had gone back to school when she turned 64 and had just obtained her degree in psychology, sustains a fall while walking up some stairs. Doctors say she’s suffered a stroke. Her speech and mobility start to slowly deteriorate. For the next 8 years, her condition continues to worsen to the point that she is not longer able to move on her own or communicate in ways that are not sobs or (mostly) untranslatable grunts.
I first read the story of the man nine days after my mom passed away on October 7, 2020, while bed bound with (Long) Covid myself, and since then I’ve been fantasizing about an alternate timeline in which I find out about that “magic” pill in time to give it to her so we can have one more conversation. A pill which allows her injured brain —described by doctors as an orchestra in which the violins played at a deafening level to the point that none the other instruments were able to be heard— to make space for the whole ensemble to play in sync again. Just for an hour.
Sixty minutes of dialogical monologuing from my bed —while trying to make sense out of what “quality time” means when one is all too aware that time is ticking. All in the hope that three thousand and six hundred seconds can be enough and not too late after all.
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