Friends tell me tales: of the woman in Mayo who took to the bed for three years, and the man in Donegal who took to the bed for a year, and the cousin of a friend who takes to the bed every winter when the rains begin. I am reminded of Darby Ruadh of Aughinish, who took to his bed for a year for yearning love of a woman he saw in a river, and of Aoife of Connacht, who took to her bed for a year, emerging only to change her stepchildren into swans, for which she was punished by being changed into a gray vulture, doomed to live on the wing as long as time endured; which is to say that she could never take to her bed until the end of the world, which is a long time to be deprived of a particularly Irish form of refuge, retreat, restoration, surrender, defiance, passivity, prayer, and sadness.
In Irish culture, taking to the bed is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve. There are black days upon me every year when I cannot help but see those families in their skeletal beds, the wet wind snarling, the infant boy whimpering, the last moans of the mother, the father weeping silently, the daughter staggering up at the last to fold the arms of her family across their chests as bony as birds.
So many dead in the bed.
And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September 11, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, the first time in sheer confusion and the second time to think through a tottering marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know.
The great American songwriter Brian Wilson famously took to his bed for three years, as