What Would Silence Sound Like?

I’m tired of writing about holding the hands of sick or dying people. After a while it starts to feel gross, constantly turning the warmth of a human hand in yours into poetry for a blog for a paycheck. I do not know what else to do. No one should be related to a writer, or even close to one. Everyone should be able to die or be ill in peace without someone waxing poetic over the autumn leaves or the wrinkles on your hands or the wisps of hair braided into tiny rivers against a hospital pillow.

But content has its own demands. We scroll looking for something to read about someone else who is doing what we’re doing but who has miraculously found words to describe it. We pay money for those words and I’m not entirely sure why. Do we read about painful things so that we can empathize, learn what it means to be human as one college professor put it to me when I was 19 and looking for the platonic ideal of art-making. Or do we like memoiristic pain because we don’t want to suffer alone. We want to know that others are suffering too.

I held her hand and she seemed so surprised to be ill. “A year ago,” she said out of nowhere “none of this was happening.” Back to back episodes of Roseanne played on the hospital television. I asked her to turn it down so we could talk but either she couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t hear me. Growing up my family always had the television on in…