Hearing

Boon loved music. Classical music, jazz, pop, rock, blues, Chinese R&B, world music – his taste was as eclectic as mine. Sitting in his car I listened to Ali Farke Toure, Joni Mitchell, Chinese songstress from the fifties Li Xianglan, the National, Jay Chou, Bach. Perhaps he loved jazz most of all. We never did go to a jazz club together – I am not really a late night person and also, back then I got up early every morning to write before I went to work; the couple of times he suggested that we check out a jazz gig, I turned him down.

I saw him play jazz guitar once. It was at V and D’s home. They had invited us to their place because it was V’s birthday. One of their dads was strumming a guitar and D asked Boon to play. Boon was very reluctant, he kept protesting that he was out of practice. But when he finally did play, he played “Satin Doll” and it was just excellent. I remember saying to him in the car as we left V and D’s place, hey, you’re really talented, yah, and you looked so happy, you should play more often.

He had classical guitar lessons every Thursday. I wish I could say that he was just as good at classical guitar, but I would be lying if I did. I could hear him practicing even though he played in the living room and he sounded constrained, even tortured at times. At least once a month, Boon would ask me whether if he should quit classical guitar and go back to jazz guitar.

One of the later conversations went something like this:

“I should stop talking about this and just decide, right?”

“Yes, please decide and let this matter go into the out-tray once and for all.”
“I can’t decide . . .”
“Why not do both? Nobody’s forcing you to choose . . .”
“Ya, but I also want to do tai chi and kettlebell and I want to have time to read . . .”
“And you are doing all those things what. No need to be angsty about this sort of thing, please.”

When Boon was in ICU, I talked to him every day after the social worker got permission for his mother and me to enter his room. There wasn’t much variety in what I said to him – I said almost always the same things, several times each day, and I said them every day. I suspect I probably also said: “It’s my turn to be the whiny and repetitive one. You can tell me to stop it and to put this in the out-tray.” He lay there, silent, his eyes closed.

But I was certain he could hear me. On October 9, the Tuesday when his mother and I were told in the morning that the operation had to be cancelled, I gowned up and went into his room and he moved his head in my direction when he heard my voice. He teared. After he collapsed on October 6, we were not allowed into his room and he had not heard a single familiar voice since that Saturday. There was a nurse who was checking something on the other side of the room and she looked at me and said, “He responds to you.” The next day other people who looked in through the glass said the same thing.

Hearing is the first faculty that we develop and the last one to go before we die. The social worker told me that when I said I didn’t know what to do and she suggested that I go in and speak to him. When his friends wanted to do something for him, they got together and recorded messages for him on a MP3 player.   

I told him everything I needed him to hear. Poor Boon! He had to lie there and listen to me go on and on and he had no choice but to listen. The reversal of our usual roles brought a wry smile to my face, actually, whenever I thought about it.

I sang hymns to him. I talked and prayed with him. I told him we were two broken-hearted people who found solace in each other’s company, that we were lost souls. I explained to him why I was not as sure about him as he was sure about me. I told him about my deep sense of shame, about my sense of failure as a woman. I told him why I never talked to him about church. I told him about God.

October 12 was the day Father Yin came and prayed for him. After I heard that Boon moved his head during the prayer, I rushed into his room and started to explain to him why I wasn’t there, how his friends C and D had insisted that I eat something and they accompanied me to the food court downstairs. I told him that I had asked C if it was wrong of me to pray with Boon and to talk to him about God, to ask him to cling to the Cross, when all the time we were together I knew Boon to be a non-Christian. C said that Boon was a searcher all his life and that Boon would do anything for me.

After I recounted to him what C had said, Boon’s shoulders moved for the first time and his upper torso turned towards me. My eyes almost popped out and I jumped up and down in joy. “You moved! You moved!” I cried out and immediately after that words of thanksgiving streamed from my mouth. I thought he had been healed at last, that this was the miraculous recovery we had hoped and prayed for. I was overjoyed.

Dr. S explained that by that point Boon’s brain was damaged and that was why he could not open his eyes, he could not even move a finger. How was it possible for him to move his head and his shoulders? I asked the doctors. Isn’t this a sign that he was going to recover?

When the nurses changed the dialysis machine the next day, we hoped that this was also a sign that he was on the mend. When I asked the nurses, they said that the machine was not working well, so that’s why they changed it.

That time when Boon moved towards me, lifting his shoulders, that was the last time he responded to me. And it was a sign. Not of the body’s recovery but a sign nonetheless of healing. The most important sign that a soul makes with all the freedom of his or her God-given free will.  

In April this year, I read CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity and found a passage about free will and love which says it so much better than I ever could. I meant to show it to a friend who was asking me searching questions about faith:

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”

(To be continued)