Keeping the Bedside

Xiao Lin works the night shift as an aide in the inpatient wing of the city hospital, in charge of the twelfth floor.

The night shift is hard, from eight at night to eight in the morning — dozens of patients on the floor, turning them, giving medicine, changing pads, so busy his feet scarcely touch the ground. But past midnight most patients sleep, and the corridor falls quiet, with only the monitors beeping one beat at a time.

It was in the second week that he noticed the old woman. At the end of the corridor was a ward, 1213, holding an old man in the last stage of liver cancer — no sons, no daughters, sent by the community office, sleeping in a stupor all day, no one to visit. Yet on his night rounds Xiao Lin several times saw an old woman keeping watch at the bedside — in a blue cloth shirt washed pale, her hair combed without a strand astray, tucking in the old man's blanket, or feeding him water with a small spoon, her movements very gentle.

Xiao Lin took her for some distant relative come at last, and was rather glad, and did not disturb her. Once, going in to change a dressing, he nodded to the old woman, and she smiled back at him, her eyes crinkling, very kind.

Then one day he mentioned to the old day-shift nurse the old woman keeping the bedside in 1213. The nurse froze, and said: that old man is utterly alone, hospitalized more than half a year, and no one has ever come to sit with him. This old woman in the blue shirt you speak of — she set down the chart in her hand and lowered her voice — the way you describe her, she sounds like an old woman who died in that very ward last year. She too had liver disease in life, a wonderfully good person; at the end she still fretted over the ward-mate no one cared for, always saying, “To bear an illness alone is too bitter.”

A chill ran down Xiao Lin's back; but thinking again, he found nothing to fear. The one that old woman kept watch over was an abandoned, solitary old man, and she had kept it half a year, tucking blankets and feeding water, never once out of temper.

That winter the old man of 1213 passed too. He went very peacefully, in his sleep. Clearing away his few things, Xiao Lin found half a fruit candy tucked under the pillow, the wrapper folded neat and square — the old-fashioned kind, orange-flavored hard candy, rarely seen now.

After that, the old woman in the blue shirt was never seen again at the end of the corridor. Sometimes, passing 1213 in the small hours, Xiao Lin would glance in. An empty ward, moonlight fallen on the bed, still and quiet. And he would think: the two of them, most likely, went away together.

Midnight Record note: A hospital ward is the most bitter place in the human world, yet even bitter places breed kindness. In life that old woman had borne the bitterness of solitary illness; in death she would not let another bear it alone. To tuck a blanket once, to give one mouthful of water — between the living and the dead there is only the warmth of a blanket's edge. Kindness is not cut off by death or life; the warmest thing in this world has never been anything ghostly, but that someone is willing to stay with you to the end.