August, 2001

FLAT ON MY BACK, I TRIED TO OPEN MY EYES

Nothing.

Still alive, I thought

I remembered a long needle pointed towards me, and a doctor, his masked face suddenly bending over me, his steady voice both encouraging and routine, saying, Now, please slowly count backwards from one hundred; and my own voice faintly responding, ninety-nine, ninety-eight ... when a veil of sleep fell over me.  A rhythm of sounds drifted in and out of my consciousness: beeping machinery tangled with fragments of casual talk, medical phrases, numbers.

For however long I was sedated, I felt only a semblance of discomfort but no pain; eventually, I tried to open my eyes to catch sight of the person whose fingers were massaging me towards wakefulness. 

Don’t stop, I tried to say.  I struggled to pronounce a salutation remembered from my Chinatown childhood, Ten thousand blessings from my ancestors to yours!

If I found the individual rubbing my forehead to be someone unknown to me, I might even lift my eyebrow, and whisper something about the kindness of strangers. But, unable to move so much as an eyelid, I simply lay there, aware that my life had been saved.

Alive, I thought.

I did not know how long I had been out. Too weak even to ask for water, I did manage to press my tongue against my teeth, but felt only grit and the curving shape of the tube stuck down my throat.

I tried again to speak, to signal that I was aware of the fingers brushing back my hair, but my lips refused even to twitch. Efforts to mumble, Thank you, thank you, dissolved into quiet gurgling in my chest. Sorry, I thought, I can’t seem to move.

The warm hand touching me sensed my frustration; the palm and fingers fell into a caressing motion, as if to chase away the thick fog in my head. All I knew for sure was that I was still in a hospital, caught in a catastrophe, and that someone was standing by me. Yet voices faintly echoed from my past, the nagging warnings of my parents and the elders of Chinatown, their fears for my bachelor ways sing-songed back into my drugged head like a chorus from an ancient opera.

One day you be old and sick and no wife be there for you, the voices scolded. For sure, you marry or no one be with you! 

No son!

No daughter!

You die alone!

The voices had not stopped until, at 23, I left Vancouver to make my life my own. I did what many young gay people did then, and still do, consciously or not — I left home to begin a life where I could meet my own kind and discover my own values. Freshly graduated from UBC, and inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., I came east in 1962 on a civil rights protest, hitch-hiking to Ottawa to demand that Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson protect the rights of all citizens equally, regardless of colour. Forty years on, here I was, still single, still in Toronto, immobilized on a bed in St. Michael’s Emergency Unit.

But someone cared enough to stay beside me.

I’m not forgotten, I thought. I can’t move, but I’m not alone.

My spine tightened; I teared up.

With a soft tissue, the same hand blotted the corner of my eyes, a gesture so intimate, so sure, that it wiped away the ancient voices.

I drifted off to sleep.

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