It is impossible not to think about life and death when there is a hospital bed in the living room. Perhaps this is one reason why hospice teams recommend that the patient’s bed be placed in a public area of the house—so that family and friends must accept the fact that their loved one is dying. It might not happen today or even tomorrow, but this life will end soon.
According to a 2009 report of the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with AARP, 29 percent of the U.S. population—more than 65 million people each year—provide care for a disabled, aged or chronically ill friend or family member. That statistic suggests a lot of hospital beds in a lot of living rooms.
A hospital bed has been set up in the house where I grew up—in the living room, which is located at the home’s geographical center. There is something rather poetic about that, although I’m sure the architects of the 1950s were thinking more about cost-cutting and space efficiency than they were about symbolic statements. Nevertheless, if you want to pick tomatoes from the garden, you must walk past the gleaming steel of that hospital bed to get through the back door. If it is time for a meal at the dining table, you are serenaded by the hums and sighs of an air compressor inflating the mattress to keep pressure sores at bay. If you prefer to sit and read a book, every time your eyes lift from the page they encounter the bed and the one who lies upon it. Whatever you do, you cannot escape the reality before you. Denial is not an option.
