One hundred days at a hospital bed taught me all of love's lessons

The day my husband was hit by a car was the seventeenth of April last year.

The doctor talked for a long time. I caught only a few words: traumatic brain injury, coma, "whether he wakes is out of our hands." From that day I lived at a bed in the neurosurgery ward. I stayed a hundred days.

In those days I learned a great many things I had never known how to do. How to read the numbers on the monitor. How to feed liquid food to a man who has forgotten how to swallow. How to turn a body that cannot move itself every two hours, pat his back, wash him. I also learned a different way of dividing day from night: by the nurses' shift change, by the sound of the monitor in the next bed, by the rattle of trolleys in the corridor.

For the first month I barely spoke. I sat there and looked at his face and waited for his eyes to open. The old man in the next bed asked me, "Is that young man good to you? Good enough to sit here like this?" I had no answer ready. Was he? Eight years married, and we had fought over the renovation, gone silent for a week over whose parents we'd spend New Year with, slammed a door over one unwashed bowl. Love had been worn so flat by ordinary days that I had almost forgotten its original shape.

Then, on the thirty-seventh day, he woke up.

He couldn't speak. His right side wouldn't answer him. The doctor said movement and language would have to be learned from the beginning, the way a baby learns them. From that day the ward became a classroom, and I was both the teacher and the pupil.

I taught him to talk again. His first word was not you and not I. I held up a photograph and asked who it was, and two muddy sounds rolled out of his throat: his son's name. His second word was pain. The third came one night, suddenly clear — water. I fumbled for the cup in the dark and my tears fell into it. I had never known that word could sound so beautiful.

I taught him to walk again. He would push himself up from the edge of the bed holding my hands, both legs shaking, like a child taking his first steps. There was a window at the end of the corridor, and I gave him a target: walk to the window, look down at the street. The first day we did three metres. On the fifth day, ten. On the thirtieth day we stood at the window. Below it was the hospital garden. He stood there a long time, then turned and said, with a tongue that still wouldn't quite obey him, "Next... next time, I'll bring you here."

Next time, I'll bring you here. He could barely get the words out, and I understood all of it.

Love is sweet in good weather. At a hospital bed it shows its bones — the bones that hold a person upright.

In those hundred days I saw the other loves in that ward too. The old gentleman in the bed opposite tasted every meal before his wife did, checking the salt. The woman in the next bay shaved her husband twice a day, and had been doing it for four years. The auntie in the corridor took two buses in from the suburbs every morning to read the newspaper aloud to her husband — she read him the classified ads, and because he laughed, she read them seriously.

Not one of them ever said the word love. What they said was: "Any better today?" "What do you feel like eating?" "Sleep. I'm here."

On the hundredth day my husband came home. He still limped a little. His speech still caught on certain words. The doctor said a year of rehabilitation lay ahead. That morning he stood up out of the wheelchair and insisted on walking the twenty-odd metres from the car door to the stairwell himself. Then he said to me, "These twenty metres I walked on my own. But those hundred days you held me up — I'll remember those for the rest of my life."

Sometimes I still think about the old man's question. My answer is one I couldn't have found a hundred days earlier and am now certain of: it isn't worth calculating. The moment love has to be calculated, there isn't enough of it.