Wannabe

In moments of despair, you still need to laugh and joke. And somehow I still have it in me to play the naughty, foolish child.

"Get off the bed! It's for "sick person"", my aunt told me. "Sick person" 病人 is Taiwanese for "patient". There's some social taboo lying in a hospital bed, especially if you're healthy. "If your grandma were here she'd scold you silly!"

It doesn't really bother me, and I seized the rare opportunity mum got out of bed to lie in it. I said I wanted to see the world from the perspective of mum... She her view from the hospital bed, see what angel she sees the world (or the room), from what angel she can see the tv screen, see from her bed what she can see of the world outside the window. It's good to put on someone else's perspective for a change, for I believe it allows you even more ability to sympathise and have compassion.

I played ill (without going overboard...) and that made my mum and my relatives laugh. "Everyone will come to this one day. I'm just preparing for it!" it's true, is it not? We will all get ill at some point, and one day we will die. For some people one follows the other, even though it may be a very unpleasant chronology, for being ill you really have very little appetite and energy to really live life, and then you die. What a sad state of affairs... A state of affairs mum seems to have landed in...

So for a good half an hour or so, I lay in mum's bed as she sat next to me, a reversal of roles. They handed me fruits, and I just lay there covered under mum's blanket, trying to see how it feels like being the "sick person". But of course I know however much I pretend, I cannot conjure up the same feelings of pain, sores and fears as mum feels...

I closed my eyes and lay under mum's blanket. Momentarily, I "blessed" the bed and blanket, silently praying that they will give mum comfort and a sense of security, silently wishing that my prayers of peace and happiness will flow from my mind and stay in the blanket and bed, and protect mum who now spends so much of her day lying here.

A lady came into quietly, and handed me a brochure advertising private health insurance. "I wish you will recover your health soon" she said to me.

"Thank you," I said as I received the brochure.

After she was gone, I chuckled out loud. There are times when you need to poke fun at reality and at life. And lying in the hospital bed is one of them.