The Silent Bench

The bench outside the hospital was not particularly remarkable. It was simply one of the places where patients could sit for a while after treatment, away from the ward and the constant rhythm of examinations, injections, and hospital meals.

That afternoon, a man was sitting there with his private caregiver. They were sitting next to each other, but they were not talking. The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It seemed more like the practical silence of two people who had already spent many hours in the same hospital. The caregiver was watching over him; the patient was simply sitting there, waiting.

They had been in the hospital for more than two months. The man’s family had not come with him this time. In the beginning, his only son had stayed for more than twenty days, accompanying him through the early part of his treatment. But eventually, work made it impossible for him to remain at the hospital. He was the man's only child. His wife was at home, but her own health was not good.

“So now you're mostly here by yourself?” I asked. He nodded. The arrangement had become necessary rather than chosen.

He was from Zhangshu, and he had come to the hospital because of lung cancer. He had already spent more than two months undergoing treatment, and his current treatment was radiotherapy. Compared with chemotherapy, he said, radiotherapy was relatively bearable. His schedule was almost mechanical: treatment once a day, five days a week, with Saturday and Sunday off because the doctors did not work. There was no dramatic complaint in the way he described it. 

When we asked whether he had felt much psychological pressure after being diagnosed, he simply said that he had not. “I don’t have much pressure. I take things in stride,” he stated as if he had recited it a thousand times. It was the expected response whenever people asked about his mentality.

He was born in 1959, though when we asked about his age, the conversation briefly became confused over whether he was already seventy. He was not quite there yet. Sitting outside the hospital, he still looked physically strong enough to walk around on his own, and he was willing to go downstairs rather than remain in bed all day. Perhaps that was another reason his caregiver encouraged him to move around.

The caregiver was a woman born in 1976. She had only started working as a caregiver the previous year. Her work was much less straightforward than it might have appeared from a distance. She helped patients get their meals. She prepared things they needed for radiotherapy. When she had time, she helped them downstairs for a walk. And she was not looking after only him. She was responsible for several patients at once. At that moment, she had come downstairs with him because the other patients upstairs were temporarily stable. Soon, however, she would have to go back and check on two more people. A twenty-four-hour shift did not mean twenty-four hours of uninterrupted physical activity. But it meant remaining responsible for patients throughout the day and night, constantly moving between people who might need something.

There were different kinds of arrangements. Some patients had a dedicated one-to-one caregiver. Others, like the people she cared for, were grouped together. She described the difference almost like the difference between carrying one heavy object and repeatedly running back and forth carrying several smaller ones. The latter could be exhausting in its own way.

At night, there was still work to do. A patient might need help getting up, going to the bathroom, eating, or moving around safely. During the day, she might need to prepare food or accompany someone to treatment. And some patients were much more difficult to care for than others. She had recently been asked whether she could go to the hospice ward on the twenty-second floor. She declined. Instead, she recommended a male caregiver. “The patients there are all very sick,” she explained. “I really can't do it.” It was not that she did not understand the importance of the work. It was precisely because she did. She knew how demanding the care of seriously ill patients could become, and she knew what she was capable of handling.

We had initially assumed that a hospice ward might not need private caregivers because nurses would be able to provide the necessary care. She shook her head. Many families simply could not sustain full-time caregiving. There were fewer children in families now. Young people had jobs and their own families. If they stopped working to stay at the hospital all day, there would be no income. At the same time, illness itself could be expensive. “It is difficult for both the family members and the patient,” she said. The sentence was simple, but it seemed to describe much of what we had been hearing throughout the hospital. The patient's illness was only one part of the burden. The question of who would look after him was another.

She told us about a woman from Jiangsu whom she had once met. The woman had lung disease herself. Her husband had suffered a stroke and was bedridden. They had two children, a seven-year-old daughter and a seventeen-year-old son. Their family circumstances were already difficult. Then there were conflicts with the woman's mother-in-law, who held strong superstitious beliefs about the family's misfortunes. The woman had once wanted to pay for separate accommodation for her mother-in-law, but relatives objected. Not long afterward, her husband suffered the stroke that left him unable to move independently. The family had only one two-bedroom apartment. The mother-in-law refused to leave. The son had to sleep in the living room. And the woman herself had to be hospitalized for treatment.

At one point, she had considered giving up treatment altogether and returning home. There was simply nobody left to look after the household. As the caregiver spoke, her voice became heavier. She remembered how the woman would cry whenever she talked about her family. Eventually, her treatment went well enough that she recovered and began working at a fruit shop to support the family. The household survived on a little more than seven hundred yuan a month in government assistance. It was barely enough for food, and her children still needed to attend school. So she had to work. The woman was not the caregiver’s client, but the story of the woman stayed with the caregiver. 

“When we were caring for another patient in the neighboring ward, we sometimes helped her with small things: bringing food, passing something to her, helping when we happened to be nearby,” The caregiver did not treat this as anything extraordinary.

“同住一间病房都是缘分，顺手搭把手而已。”

Living in the same ward, she said, was simply a kind of fate. If someone needed help and you happened to be there, you helped. That seemed to be her philosophy of the hospital.

She had only been a caregiver since last year, so she could not remember exactly how many patients she had looked after. The length of each job depended on the patient's treatment. Radiotherapy and chemotherapy patients often stayed for a long time. Sometimes it is fifty days, and sometimes it lasts for nearly two months. Shorter treatment periods could end much sooner. She had even once left a patient before the treatment was finished because something happened at home and she had to return.

Her own life existed outside the hospital too. She had two sons. Her elder son was twenty-five. Her younger son had been born in 2008 and had just turned eighteen. When I mentioned that I was eighteen, the caregiver immediately smiled at the coincidence. For a moment, the hospital seemed less like a place where strangers from different families had been brought together by illness. They were simply talking about their children, and about how people seemed to marry and have children later and later.

The patient remained quiet beside her. He had not said much throughout the conversation. When we asked about his appetite, however, he answered immediately, “My stomach is fine.” He could eat. The caregiver told us that his meal times depended on when his treatment ended. If he finished at five, he ate at five. If treatment ended at six, he ate at six. But he often thought the meals were too early. And, according to his caregiver, he also had a particularly cheerful personality. 

She compared him with another patient upstairs, an older woman undergoing radiotherapy. That woman was very different. She was afraid of the cold. She did not like going downstairs. She rarely talked with other patients. She would only talk to the caregiver. The caregiver repeatedly encouraged her to come downstairs, walk around, and talk to people. She refused. There was no easy way to force someone to feel better, so the caregiver could only keep trying. Perhaps this was another part of her job that did not appear on any list of duties. She was paid to bring meals and accompany patients to treatment, but sometimes she also became the person who listened, who encouraged someone to take a walk, who witnessed a patient crying because there was nobody else to take care of things at home. And sometimes, simply the person who happened to be sitting beside someone when the ward became too quiet. 

By then, the patient's treatment was probably finished for the day. The caregiver still had to buy food and return upstairs to check on the other patients. As we walked away, the man remained seated on the bench. His caregiver was beside him, but neither of them was speaking. For the moment, there was nothing that needed to be said. Soon she would go upstairs to look after the other patients. He would probably return to his ward, eat when he felt like eating, and continue another day of radiotherapy.

Their silence suddenly seemed different from when we had first arrived. It was simply another form of companionship rather than estrangement.