The home health nurse was working a crossword puzzle and barely looked up as I entered the house. She (and all the ones just like her) is used to us. Those who come and go, never bothering to knock at the front door (who would answer if we did?), we who rarely offer more than a polite smile and a nod.

I walk past her (and past the cherrywood coffee table with its blanket of syringes, gauze, and medicine bottles) into the dining room. The oak dining table is gone (who would use it now?) and with it the four brocade chairs that surrounded it. All were removed the day the hospital bed arrived.

I stand at the foot of the bed, about to speak, when I realize that Christopher is sleeping. Quietly, I move around to the side of the bed and pull the Queen Anne chair in close (once again cursing whoever it is that keeps shoving the chair up against the wall where it looks nice, but makes for lousy conversation).

Sleep is so precious (and so rare), I do not wake him. I observe the signs of a long day. The ashtray on Christopher's table is empty (the home health nurses tend to frown on his smoking when the oxygen is in use), the port in his bony naked chest is once again sporting a line attached to an I.V. bag, and there is a cloth draped across his bald head (I cannot help but wonder if the cloth had been cool and damp to relieve the fever, or warm and dry to trap the body heat).

I watch him as he sleeps. And I wonder what it must be to be thirty-two and trapped in a hospital bed in what was once a dining room.

Conscious that I am staring and not wanting Christopher to wake and find me staring (thinking such intimacies should be reserved for lovers), I close my eyes.

And I listen to him breathe. And struggle to breathe.

The home health nurse rustles about the living room and the noise is enough to cause Christopher to stir awake. I glance in his direction. He looks at me and starts to speak, but before the words can come, his eyes close and he slips back into sleep.

So I sit at Christopher's bedside, eyes closed, knowing that speech is no longer necessary. That words are excess now. That what is important is human presence and what is shared in silence.

And I know that this room, which was once a dining room, is now a holy place.

©1994 Claire Amundsen Schaeffer, All Rights Reserved.