40 Days of Lent: Day Fourteen

Setting for a story:

Story to take place in a hospital ward where long term catatonic and comatose patients are kept.  The families and lovers of these patients tend to decorate their beds and the surrounding areas with items that were once significant to them, in the hopes that should they wake, they will be comforted by familiar objects.  Some patients have so many mementos around them that their beds have begun to look like altars, perhaps appropriate given how much praying goes on at their side.  The families of poor patients might feel some shame when they seem the elaborate displays around the beds of the wealthier catatonics.  The hospital should be the one place they don't feel lower class, yet even here...No doubt some families would find themselves competing with each other.  Each would be determined to have the most impressive display in the ward, similar to those that try to out-decorate
their neighbors at Christmas.

There might be a young man, a newlywed whose wife became comatose shortly after their marriage, who realizes that they didn't have enough time to build many associations or memories around any common objects.  There would be a severe almost Puritan couple who would no doubt embrace minimalism for their loved one, preferring the peacefulness found in just plain clean sheets.  Their artful minimal aesthetic would put the more gaudy presentations to shame, not that the other families would notice.