I’d already noticed how my own voice had changed: losing some of its sharp peaks and bounce, and gaining firm new ridges. My phrases were smaller, slower; my rhythms thick and clumsy, not light and dancing. I now seemed to quarry words, one by one, presenting them like bright bits of jasper—not slurred in a wash of flurried adjectives—when I spoke to Paul. Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. But I savored the delicious warm touch-ribbons of silent affection, uniting and comforting us, even when words failed. And I followed the stew of sympathy from friends, whose faces flickered with unrefined sorrow-compassion-pity.
Could I continue to woo life, despite the abysmal sadness? Surely Lewis had more courage than I possessed. How tempting to live in limbo and wait for my real life to return. But this was my real life now. Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.
“All part of the adventure,” I often reminded myself, “all part of the adventure.” Repeated out loud like a mantra. Felt at times like a hoax. At others it became a balm of understanding to spread across a mind in misery, one of the many transparent liniments for sprained emotions that humans rely on. Like hope. Or faith. “All part of the adventure.” One that began with blue-green algae, I thought. No, farther back, in volcanic verdigris on the ocean floor. No, farther back still, to where our atoms were forged in the spinning, spitting, detonating furnace of the sun. No, much farther back in space-time. That meant picturing things before the Big Bang, when the entire universe was all in one place and solid: a small silky nugget of hydrogen floating in an endless void. The effort would gently tug my mind from suffering to curiosity. Only for moments, of course, but that’s all we ever have, a mass of moments, currents of being.
Ironically, Paul and C. S. Lewis had once been in correspondence, around the time Joy was dying, still a young woman. Death made quick work of her half-quenched mind. How on earth did Lewis, as caregiver, manage to correspond with people, or even spend time with friends? Would Paul’s stroke create a great distance between me and my friends because now we always had to include it in our intimacies or business, always had to include this massive sadness? At the farmers’ market, for example, I bumped into several friends, as one often does while strolling among the stalls of fresh local produce, crafts, and ethnic foods.
Each person immediately asked: “How is Paul?”
In the past, they would have asked: “How are you?”
I told myself that there were going to be shifts in my relationships, meaningful shifts, and that those who loved me would shift along with what was going on. That was my hope.
To one friend, a photographer of local landscapes, I said: “I need a break from Paul; let’s not talk about it. What are you working on?”
But Paul’s stroke elbowed into most of my sentences; every topic seemed related to it; I was immersed, I couldn’t banish it from my thoughts, much as I wished to. It was a kind of hypnosis, not just a trauma, and it bore all the tooth marks of unshakable obsession.
WHEN I RETURNED to the hospital, I found Paul listless and sad.
“Die,” he said solemnly.
My already faint spirits sank even lower. I heard Kelly’s voice in the hallway, on her way in for the morning’s speech therapy, and I caught her before she entered the room, warning her in a whisper that he was feeling very low and didn’t want to live.
“How are you doing this morning?” she greeted Paul with achieved cheerfulness.
He shrugged. In a practiced motion, she tilted his bed so that he could sit up.
“Ready for speech therapy today?” she asked anyway, flashing a small reassuring smile.
He nodded a resigned yes. Kelly was irresistible. With close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes, and petite build, she looked like a high school cheerleader. Though she seemed upbeat and hopeful, her smile always appeared genuine. No small feat that, knowing the plight of her patients. Kelly didn’t expect to see her patients fully recover, that wasn’t the nature of her work. She smiled the smile of someone wedded to the incomplete, used to working with badly stricken stroke victims. Paul responded well to her ease and expertise.
When she asked him to pronounce the vowel a on cue, even with her coaching he only managed it 50 percent of the time, often by sighing or yawning first. She showed him how to stretch his lips into an e, an i, an o, a u. As children, we learn to tug the strings of facial muscles—curling or flicking the tongue, pursing or yawning the mouth—babbling, mimicking, somehow coordinating the whole lot. We practice with gusto, parent guidance, and endless repetition, until the brain gradually stores an unconscious memory of how the tongue and mouth must dance in unison to voice a word. Even after seventy-five years of daily use, that marionette can lose some of its strings. It seemed impossible, but Paul had to relearn how to sound out the alphabet again, sculpt the mouth, aim the tongue, work the bellows of the lungs, just to say a small owlish word like who.
Kelly drilled him in simple yes/no questions, which he answered correctly only about half the time (and how many of those were chance?). As the questions became more difficult—“Do you write with a pen?” “Do you write with a toaster?” “Does a cork sink in water?” “Will a stone sink in water?”—he needed more time and rarely found the right answer. Next she showed him two pictures and one word, pronounced the word slowly, and asked him to point to the correct picture. Paul only answered right half the time. Did he really not know what a dog was? How could you lose the word that goes with a glass? She then named objects in the room and asked him to point to them, which he got right about half of the time. Body parts he could point to with slightly more accuracy, which seemed brilliant compared to his other test scores. When she asked him to print his name using his left hand (since his right was too weak to hold a pen), he wrote P-A-U-L in just-decipherable letters.
“That’s right!” she said.
“Was it really?” he asked unexpectedly, in a tone of innocent surprise.
Where did that come from? I wondered. So smooth and normal!
“Now your last name, Mr. West.”
He printed a legible W, and then the rest of the letters wormed away. When he saw the hint of disappointment on her face, he took a deep breath, as if preparing for a marathon, hesitated several times, and finally croaked: “I . . . I’m . . . s-s-sorry.”
Her morning report, which distilled his progress, recorded a ten percent improvement, his two reflexive comments, and the same banners as before:
Severe apraxia of speech.
Oral apraxia.
Severe Broca’s aphasia.
Dysphagia.
A dose of Ritalin helped him focus for the afternoon’s speech therapy, but it also seemed to make him more agitated and angry. Or the therapy session’s strains and frustrations left him that way. Or he was just tired. Whatever the reason, that became the pattern each day, and at such times I learned to leave for a few hours and return at nightfall, usually arriving in time to watch a cloud of bats, swinging right side up as they flew out from under the eaves, and feeling grateful the trials of afternoon therapy were over.
CHAPTER 10
AT HOME, WHEN I OPENED THE FRONT DOOR, A BREEZE sighed through, as if the house were psycho-sensitive, like one of those in “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,” a sci-fi short story by J. G. Ballard, in which houses can be driven to hysteria by their owners’ neuroses, walls sweat with anxiety, staircases keen if the owner dies. Pushing the heavy door closed behind me, I dropped my keys onto the kitchen counter, and their clatter smashed through the uncommon silence.
As I slouched down the hallway, nothing looked familiar. A strange disorder ruled my study, where, at regular intervals, I used to scare papers into files neat as hedgerows. Now b
ooks lay slaughtered on the rug, and, on the desk, unopened letters duned among bills and coffee cups, in a room spontaneous as a compost heap. My world was in shambles, inside and out. My body also felt derelict and unlived in. Every little thing, no matter how small—putting on makeup, changing my clothes, washing my hair—seemed to add boulders to an already unbearable weight. I felt as if a spare particle would make me collapse. I kept forgetting to eat, and, anyway, the refrigerator was bare because I hadn’t the energy to shop. Whenever I finally dragged into bed, exhausted, I woke unrested to find Paul’s side of the bed strangely empty, his study oddly quiet. Sometimes I felt broad stripes of sadness, the full tarot deck of anticipated loss, and throbbing worry. I’d suffered many losses in recent years, after my father, mother, uncle, aunt, and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one still alive who had known her as a girl, and I was starting to understand how spooked she’d felt. I wasn’t sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms.
In my study’s bay window, my poet self stepped out of the shadows and I saw through her eyes again, the eyes of my childhood. I pulled up a cozy star-quilt my friend Jeanne had stitched by hand, and gazed out at the magnolia tree, bridging the mineral earth with the breathless blue sky. Its bark looked like unironed linen. Two wrens tried to land on the pagoda-shaped birdhouse, not smoothly but with bumps, wrong cues, and collisions, followed by the faint clamor of nestlings. A red squirrel dragged a black walnut into a redoubt among the high branches, and began shredding the thick husk as if it were flaying a woolly mammoth. The metallic snore of cicadas buzzed and quit, buzzed and quit. A fly danced at the screen.
The average lifespan in the West is 80 years, or 2.5 billion seconds. So Paul was already old by human standards. Truly ancient compared to the fly buzzing the windowpane. But young, a mere stripling, compared to some other life forms like “Methusaleh,” the 4,841-year-old pine tree in the Mohave Desert, and some 200-year-old rockfish, bowhead whales, carp, and tortoises. Or the virtually immortal species of jellyfish that begins as a polyp, becomes sexually mature, grows old and decrepit, then returns to the polyp stage and matures again—indefinitely. Paul’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors didn’t expect to live beyond 30 to 40 years (mainly because of diseases since cured or curbed). Paul had survived longer thanks to medical interventions like the pacemaker (which would have lengthened his father’s life), and drugs for blood pressure and diabetes.
Looking out over the evening skyscape, I felt some of what Joseph Campbell must have when he spoke of feeling “a certain tenderness toward the lovely gift of light, a gentle gratitude for things made visible.” More now than ever, I needed this pocket of calm and continuity. Losing myself in nature provided the right tonic. For me, that’s always been where worry takes a holiday and the earth feels solid underfoot. After a while, I left the bay window and passed into the back garden, to stroll a while, empty my mind, and let it fill with the dew, quickening shadows, riot of pinks and purples low on the horizon, and then the silent gold fury of the sun. It was always there, always right where I left it the day before, always on time. What a relief.
Plunging into those moments with wonder and an open heart refreshed my spirit. There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It quiets the bitter almonds of the limbic system, and gives the brain a small vacation. The vivid spectacles of the sun stopped me in my mental tracks, and for whole minutes I simply was among the fruits of summer. I didn’t always feel up to losing myself in nature like that, but whenever I could it fortified me.
Returning to the hospital after dinner, I found Paul lying awake in his bed, his forehead pinched in an expression of broodiness I was getting used to seeing. No surprise he was still depressed. I sat down in a chair on his right, with the windows behind me, as the blood-orange red sunset streaked the sky. A “clean sunset.” No haze to dim its color. Nothing in my life seemed that crystal clear or elementary anymore. It was hard for Paul to see my face when I was backlit. He looked worried, childlike.
“Sc-sc-scared,” he sputtered.
“You’re scared?” I asked.
He nodded yes.
“What are you scared of?”
“Mem, mem, mem, you’ll, mem, mem, leave. Would. would. wouldn’t blame,” he garbled. It was the longest thing he’d said thus far.
My excitement collided with his sadness, as I rejoiced over the small improvement.
I went around to the other side of the bed, so that he could see my face better, and hugged him. Even if he couldn’t understand all my words, he could sort of lip-read my face, using ancient skills to decipher my meaning.
“I’m not going to leave you,” I reassured, stroking his forehead. “I wish this hadn’t happened to you, to us, but you’re still my sweetheart and I love you. I’m not going to abandon you, you don’t have to worry about that.”
He nodded a slight yes and relaxed his gaze. He understood. I didn’t know if he believed me. Or if I believed me. Who knew what lay ahead. I laughed to myself, remembering Dorothy Parker’s quip: “What fresh hell is this?” It felt good to laugh, even silently and a bit darkly, and even if, for once, I couldn’t share the literary allusion with him.
FIVE WEEKS IN the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. And yet, what had I done in the hospital? Little more than keep Paul company, sleep, watch, anguish, and guard. Speech and physical therapy exhausted him, and he slept much of each day. Worry, vigilance, and trying to understand Paul exhausted me, and I dozed a lot, too. Can waiting, by definition slow, flash by? It can when the hours and days blur into a disturbing new routine fraught with uncertainty. Time becomes even more elastic than usual—minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together.
As his brain cooled and the swelling began to shrink, his speech and comprehension improved a bit more, though he still found people hard to fathom, and he mainly spoke gibberish punctuated by “Mem, mem, mem.”
Kelly arrived for a routine breakfast session, and he greeted her in very communicative gestures, beginning with a cupped hand to usher her in. Then, with a sweep of his hand, he asked her to take a seat.
His hard plastic breakfast tray held a thick blue rubber mug, faded from use, and an assortment of heavy plastic plates and bowls the color of sand. Porridge for breakfast, thickened orange juice, thickened cocoa. A bowl of pudding shrouded in shiny plastic. He didn’t like the thickened liquids and told her so by pretending to banish them with one hand. Again she explained why thickened liquids were important, that the stroke had affected his swallowing muscles. When he tried to drink the thick orange juice from its cup and discovered it wouldn’t pour, he mimed disgust. Kelly suggested he use a spoon. Did it even rank as liquid if you had to eat it with a spoon? I didn’t think so, and clearly Paul didn’t either.
“What work did you do?” she asked.
I flinched at her choice of the past tense.
Pausing from breakfast, he made several false starts, then, while circling one hand in the air, he slurred: “Books.”
“That’s wonderful. Can you name one of your books?”
Cringing from the effort, he tried to string words together, but over and over seemed to tumble away from them, as if he were falling down a cliff, striking a rubble of nonsense sounds. A long spell of gibberish followed, during which he grew more and more frustrated.
Paul gathered himself up, looking strangely like an impostor of his old professorial self, squaring his shoulders, and stared directly at Kelly. She studied him intently. I held my breath, waiting for the words to come out. He concentrated, inhaled, opened his mouth for “Mem, mem, mem, P-pollen, rggh, mem, mem, P-pollen, MEM,” followed by an even longer clotted stream of gibberish.
“I am an individual!
” he suddenly blurted out. That took my breath away. It was an allusion to a film we had seen, The Elephant Man, about a severely deformed nineteenth-century man who begins mute and is coached to speak. In one scene, cornered by an angry mob, he cries out: “I am not an animal! I am a man!” Did other stroke victims feel like freaks? I bet some did. I bet, regardless of their life before the stroke, they just longed to be ordinary people again. That’s all I wished for him as well, not to feel like his tongue was caught in a bear trap when he spoke, not to have a padlocked mind.
“Take a deep breath and try again,” Kelly urged. “Use key words. Speak slowly.”
After several tries and a stream of “mem, mem, mem’s,” he painstakingly drawled four words with a pause between them: “Place . . . Flies . . . Where . . . Pollen.” Settling back, he sighed. It was the best he could do. I knew he had meant The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, his novel about a Hopi kachina carver, but I didn’t speak. In a few years, Éditions Gallimard in Paris would publish the French translation of this novel to wide praise. But for now, Paul couldn’t even pronounce the title of his own creation.
Still, sitting at the sidelines, I wasn’t watching passively; I was silently rooting for him and saying the correct answers in my mind. I bet parents are like this with kids as they learn, I thought. So much in a relationship changes when a partner is seriously ill, helpless yet blameless, and indefatigably needy. I felt old. The night before, crying, he had assumed a fetal position, and then I laid my head against his neck and gently rocked him, murmuring “Rest, little fellow, it’s going to be all right.” When I sang him a nursery song about Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, I felt him sinking at last into the blind trust children feel in the arms of a parent holding them high above the earth, safe from its fray. I cupped myself around him, as if I were shielding a flame. I felt responsible for his little life. At last, his breath deepened and he drifted off to sleep, while the searchlight of my vigilance burned a hole in the darkness.