The Soul of Sounds

I was sitting there in the hospital room. My parent’s had left hours ago. I could hear the rise and fall of the life support machine, breathing for my grandfather. It sounded like some bastard robot imitating an out of breath jogger. The rubber tubes flexed and relaxed with each shock of air; inhale, exhale, up, down, click, clack, beep, beep. The sound of fake breathing, a mechanical inhuman pulse. It’s something I’ll never forget. I hate it.

We own this musical device. It’s like a tape player except it only plays this same Buddhist chant over and over again, repeating it forever, lest the batteries die. We play it on the death bed of our loved ones, so they can listen to it as they move into afterlife, reincarnation, enlightenment, whatever. That chanting, coming out of its tiny distorted polyphonic speaker, comforts me.

It’s funny how sound can have a soul. The footsteps of someone you recognize, the sound of your mother cooking, a hospital room with a life support machine, those comforting monks chanting on into eternity.

He died a little over a year ago. It happened unexpectedly enough. One cloudy day as I was walking to class my phone rang. I had just left the auto repair next door to my apartment where my car was getting a tire replaced. It looked nothing like springtime in Los Angeles. Next thing I know I’m pacing back and forth outside the hospital. Playing the ‘avoid the cracks’ game I used to as a child. Two tiles forward, one step right, like the knight on a chess board. I’d take five steps, turn around, repeat. I did this for hours while my family sat there in his hospital room, watching him die.

It was a game I used to play when the cobblestone streets of Cologne made it much more interesting. I would follow my grandfather all over the neighborhood back then. The Einkaufcentrum was our favorite, an endless array of grocers, restaurants, books, and trinkets for me to play with. A close second was the huge pond behind our apartment building. I can’t remember too well these days but it seemed like something out of a fairy tale. An idyllic fantasy that you’re never quite sure existed.

What I do remember is a much less romantic tale. A boring, incremental, and anticlimactic story of fleeting friendship. I can’t say there was a defining point when it happened. It was gradual. When he finally moved to be with the rest of our family in the states everything was amicable enough. I was a young teenager at the time. We would visit and I would say hello, be respectful, make idle chit chat. The language might have been the same but the sound was different. I wasn’t four years old anymore. This wasn’t Germany. I was a different person.

I promised myself then that I would work harder at our relationship. But growing up in five different homes before the fourth grade changes a person. It hardens you, destroys any roots you’ll ever develop, makes you a mental nomad. I don’t remember this but my parents tell me I cried for days after we left Germany. They say I kept calling out for my grandfather, my best friend.

The months went by, then years. I was growing up, busy with school, busy with friends, with life. He wasn’t a continent away anymore, but either way we rarely saw one another. When we did I would watch TV, read a book, take a nap. Anything to avoid our now awkward and pointless conversations. And I never fulfilled my promise.

The sounds of my life had an easy charm when I was in Germany. They were comfortable conversations in Vietnamese. There were jokes, elevator rides, ice cream trips, a whole magnificent world for a young boy to discover. A world free from a self consciousness I now have about my accent. A pathetic, crushing, and useless self doubt that destroyed one of the best friendships I ever had.

Walking back and forth, outside the hospital, I managed to hold back tears as I recalled all those wonderful days of my forgone youth with my grandfather. I opened back up those forgotten tiny moments in my past that I had blocked away like so much errant noise. They were hidden somewhere out of sight, out of mind; placed in the depths of a mental abyss. For in my busy modern world I had no time to let the painful heartbreaks of the past come out.

But that night I felt it appropriate.

Later, as we gathered around him, a nurse entered the room. She was a small woman, quiet and respectful. We formed a semicircle around his bed as she kneeled behind the machines. Click, one of the switches turned off. No more beeps. She pressed a red button. No more up and down. The tubes connected to his mouth, they were removed. No more flexing, no more shocks of air. I watched as the small woman wheeled the machine out of the room. No more inhale, no more exhale. No more mechanical pulse. No more sound. It was a relief. They had abandoned their friends, the consoling unremitting monks.

Sounds have souls like everything else. They love, hate, cry, and laugh. I am much too young a man to have major regrets in my life. But I do have one. And with my grandfather’s death, he closed the door on all those sounds that meant the world to me as a child.