legends · 5 min read ·
Night Visits
A carer's night monitor records a woman singing at her mother's bedside, and then records the carer's own voice from another room.
**Monitor log, Care Unit CM-7 (auto-recorded, 3 November)**
*02:14 — Sound detected: resident, awake. Duration: 40 s.*
*02:15 — Sound detected: resident, quiet. Second voice detected: adult female, low, singing.*
*02:17 — Second voice: unrecognised.*
*02:18 — Resident laughs.*
· · ·
I moved my mother in with us in the summer, after the second fall. Dan said we would manage, and we did, in the way people manage with a flat that has cracked tiles and a radiator that clanks all night. The care monitor was his idea. It was a plain white unit with a green light, and a small screen that showed a wave whenever it picked up a sound. I put the receiver in the kitchen, because her room was at the far end of the corridor and I was always too tired to walk all the way down.
My mother was eighty-three and had begun to lose the days. She slept in two-hour pieces, and so, by October, did I. I kept a paper log by my bed of every dose and every trip to the bathroom and every time she stopped calling out. My sister said that was obsessive. I said I needed to know where the hours went.
On the third of November, the log had a line I hadn't written.
*02:15 — Second voice, adult female. Singing.*
· · ·
I didn't remember writing it. I remember the two o'clock round. I remember sitting on the edge of her bed with her hand in mine and the door open. I remember the radiator and the streetlight through the blind. I don't remember a voice.
But the monitor had recorded one. I played it back that morning on the kitchen speaker, with the sound low, while Dan slept.
It was a woman's voice, low and slow, the kind of singing you hear through a wall when someone is sitting up with the sick. The tune was one I didn't know. The words were soft, and I could only half-hear them, but they were a hymn, and the singer was very close to the microphone.
At 02:17 the singing stopped.
At 02:18 my mother laughed.
It was a real laugh, the first she had given me in a year. A bright, delighted little bubble of sound that made me sit down on the kitchen floor with my hand over my mouth.
· · ·
**Journal, 4 November**
I asked Dan to sleep in her room tonight. He said he would rather sit up and listen to the monitor with me. I said no, I want you to sleep, and he gave me a look I didn't like, as if I had asked him to walk out into the road.
He didn't argue. He carried his pillow down the corridor and put it on the floor by her bed.
I stayed in our bedroom with the door half shut and the receiver on the bedside table. The green light was on.
At 02:14 my mother woke and called out. I got up, slowly, and went down the corridor, and stopped at her door.
Dan was asleep on the floor, pillow under his head, his breath deep and even.
The armchair in the corner was moving. Very slowly, back and forth, and I could hear the wooden rockers creak with each swing. I have never owned a rocking chair.
There was a woman sitting in it. I could see her from the doorway. She wore a long grey dressing gown, and her hair was loose over her shoulders, and she was holding my mother's hand in both of hers, with my mother's face turned toward the window and the blind.
She was singing. The same hymn, very low.
She looked up at me without stopping.
I said, "That's my mother."
She smiled, quite gently, and said, "Yes. She has been asking for you. You took too long to get up."
· · ·
**Monitor log, Care Unit CM-7 (auto-recorded, 4 November)**
*02:14 — Sound detected: resident, awake. Duration: 22 s.*
*02:16 — Second voice: adult female, singing.*
*02:17 — Sound detected: resident, quiet. Voice count: 2.*
*02:20 — Voice count: 1.*
· · ·
**Journal, 5 November**
I went in at six. Dan was still asleep on the floor. The bed was empty. The armchair was still, and the blind was up, and the window was cold.
My mother was in my arms. I hadn't lifted her. She was just there, warm and light against my shoulder, asleep, her breath slow and even.
I don't remember walking back down the corridor. I remember the kitchen. I remember the receiver on the table with its green light on, and the wave on its screen, flat and quiet.
I have been sitting here for an hour, trying to work out what I have been giving her. The cup is still in the steriliser. The paper log by the bed has a line in my handwriting for the two o'clock round, and then, in the same hand, a line for the four o'clock round, and then a line for every round since the summer.
Every line says the same thing.
*Seen to by: daughter.*
But I have never been up at four. I have been asleep. I have been asleep for a long time.
· · ·
**Monitor log, Care Unit CM-7 (auto-recorded, 6 November)**
*02:14 — Sound detected: resident, awake.*
*02:14 — Sound detected: adult female, singing, from kitchen.*
*02:15 — Second voice: unrecognised. Voice is in the resident's room.*
*02:15 — Second voice: "She's asleep. I'll sit with her for a bit."*
*Note: the unit's green light is on. The receiver is in the kitchen. The resident's room has no monitor.*