This is a sketch from a dream. In the dream, I am in New Orleans and I get lost in a hospital and find myself on the outer perimeter of the building, where patients who are not worth saving have been left to the mercies of nature. One of these figures is just a 'head in a bed', someone who has lost all their faculties. In my dream, he is really just a head, lost and confused with his hair curling out around him to create letters and words, maybe the words that he himself cannot express.
Someone used this expression years ago about my husband. They said that I would be able to travel again when he became just a head in a bed. Need I say that it was a horribly heartless thing to say?
So far, this has not happened to him. He still smiles and laughes. Not very often and in a very blunted way, but still he surprises me.
It is not his head that is pictured here. It is actually someone I knew as a teenager: Vincent Schiavelli, who died recently. He was gigantic and grotesque and yet he was dating my friend Dolories who was about 4 feet tall. What made me think of him, I don't know. There sure is a lot I don't know.
1 comment:
I remember your telling me about the comment. At the time, I thought it would actually be possible to regard someone as a "head on the bed", but now I know better. A person one has cared for and loved can never become a head on the bed. Now I think the person who said it, must not only be thoughtless, but certainly never have watched someone die, or cared for anyone.
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