This is just my personal interpretation, because I honestly think just saying "Bear is about abortion" throws the entire album out of whack. There's more to this song than first meets the eye.
When you listen to Hospice, it's important to remember that there are two parallel stories being told. The first and most obvious is the story of the caretaker (the narrator) and the cancer patient (for simplicity's sake, lets call her "Sylvia"). This is used as an allegory to describe the complexities and eventual death of a relationship that Peter Silberman was in.
While the lyrics to this song indicate an abortion, it would be quite irrelevant to the rest of the narrative to put a random abortion song smack-dab in the middle of the album. Perhaps, as previous commentors have speculated, it was an abortion that was necessary to undergo cancer treatment, but let's not label this song "Abortion, abortion, abortion!" and move on, there's a bigger, more important picture here.
How does an abortion tie in to the real-life story of Silberman's relationship? You could say that He and his girlfriend had an abortion, but that's far too simple, and certainly not information normal people flaunt to the public. It makes more sense that the abortion (just like the other events in the doctor/sylvia narrative) is simply an allegory for another event in the relationship.
The rest of Hospice indicates that the real life Sylvia's mental/emotional problems (the cancer) and Silberman's inability to help her deal with them ("Cure her") is what tears apart their relationship. In the narrative, we have an abortion, and this strains the doctor/patient relationship (When we get home we're bigger strangers than we've ever been before/You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor)Think of it this way: An abortion is snuffing out life from inside a woman, something inside of her dying. Something inside of our real-life Sylvia has died, perhaps the last thing left that made Peter love her, now all that remains is negativity.
This is just my personal interpretation, because I honestly think just saying "Bear is about abortion" throws the entire album out of whack. There's more to this song than first meets the eye.
When you listen to Hospice, it's important to remember that there are two parallel stories being told. The first and most obvious is the story of the caretaker (the narrator) and the cancer patient (for simplicity's sake, lets call her "Sylvia"). This is used as an allegory to describe the complexities and eventual death of a relationship that Peter Silberman was in.
While the lyrics to this song indicate an abortion, it would be quite irrelevant to the rest of the narrative to put a random abortion song smack-dab in the middle of the album. Perhaps, as previous commentors have speculated, it was an abortion that was necessary to undergo cancer treatment, but let's not label this song "Abortion, abortion, abortion!" and move on, there's a bigger, more important picture here.
How does an abortion tie in to the real-life story of Silberman's relationship? You could say that He and his girlfriend had an abortion, but that's far too simple, and certainly not information normal people flaunt to the public. It makes more sense that the abortion (just like the other events in the doctor/sylvia narrative) is simply an allegory for another event in the relationship.
The rest of Hospice indicates that the real life Sylvia's mental/emotional problems (the cancer) and Silberman's inability to help her deal with them ("Cure her") is what tears apart their relationship. In the narrative, we have an abortion, and this strains the doctor/patient relationship (When we get home we're bigger strangers than we've ever been before/You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor)Think of it this way: An abortion is snuffing out life from inside a woman, something inside of her dying. Something inside of our real-life Sylvia has died, perhaps the last thing left that made Peter love her, now all that remains is negativity.