The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  In it were many kinds of stones and crystals, beautiful handmade kimonos, and a large assortment of earrings, bracelets, and pins. Most important to me were the books on shelves that lined a wall next to the river. Beside the books was a couch on which I often sat thumbing through one book or another, reading short sections, and occasionally buying one that especially interested me. I bought Return of the Bird Tribes by Ken Carey, Mysticism and the New Physics by Michael Talbot, and Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine. In different ways all three of the books contributed to my spiritual understanding. I believe it was Ken Carey’s book that stated that in a future time, when our world had dramatically progressed spiritually, people would no longer feel anger but would only live lives of love. I read that passage many times while thinking of all the anger I had expressed in the past.

  Maija Meijers owned the store, and sometimes we had brief conversations. Once she told me that when she was going through a difficult time during her youth, she discovered she could channel beings from the spirit world and explained something of how this had changed her life. Sometimes, when I was especially despairing, I went to her for readings. During one reading she channeled a woman who told me that she was once a nun in a convent in which I was mother superior. This interested me a great deal, as Peg Robbins, who channeled and continues to channel The Ones, had also told me I’d been a mother superior in a past life. Perhaps that explained why I was so drawn to rosaries and religious medals, and spent so much time reading about saints.

  Maija no longer has the store in which I spent so many enriching hours. But my relationship with her has endured. And over the last twenty years I’ve continued to read books about spiritual growth just as I’ve continued my practices of prayer and meditation while the Deerfield continues to flow past my window on its long journey to the sea.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I

  1989

  I‘D RETURNED THAT DAY FROM A SHORT VACATION ON CAPE COD WITH Kendall and felt tired from the trip. I drove to Northampton and let Kendall off at her house. Then I drove myself home to Shelburne Falls.

  In the middle of our last night on the Cape, Kendall had waked me, telling me that a voice had come to her in a dream, saying: “Tell Margaret to feel the energy passing through you, into her, and back again. This will be only for a little while.” Kendall felt the severity of the message and embraced me with the strength of one sealing a pact. Neither of us consciously had any idea what the dream meant.

  After returning home I had dinner at the Riverside Restaurant. A white candle burned on the table. Out the window, reflections of the street lamps on the Bridge of Flowers shone on the river’s dark water. The owner of the restaurant, Debby Yaffee, sat with me while I ate. I no longer remember a word of our conversation, though that was the last time I ever spoke in my easy Southern drawl.

  Sometime during the night, I woke with a sharp pain in a tooth. I would find out later that I’d clenched my teeth with such force that I’d cracked it down its middle. But that night, I only roused briefly to think: I’ve just had a seizure, though I’d never had a seizure before. Then I lost consciousness.

  The next morning I woke confused. Walking to the kitchen, I dragged my left foot slightly. At the table I fumbled with a pack of cigarettes, took one out, put it in my mouth, and lit it. When I tried to take a drag, the cigarette fell to the floor. I had no conscious awareness that half my mouth was paralyzed. Puzzled, I bent down, picked the cigarette up, and again put it in my mouth. Again it fell out. I picked it up, thinking, My God, I could start afire.

  I put the cigarette out in the kitchen sink and dialed Kendall’s phone number. When she answered, I opened my mouth to speak, but what came out was terrifying guttural gibberish. Kendall responded with puzzlement, then alarm. I struggled with the sounds erupting from my mouth until I was able to say the single word, “Help.”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Waiting for her arrival, I sat at my kitchen table, writing. I wrote that no matter what I might sound like when I tried to talk, I was sane and rational. I thanked her for the beautiful weekend. I pushed my pen across the paper with a cold, calm terror.

  When Kendall arrived, we immediately left for the hospital, but just as she was about to turn onto the Mohawk Trail, I stopped her because I’d forgotten to take my living will with me. I was afraid my condition would deteriorate and I would be hooked up to a life-support system that I didn’t want. We went back to my apartment and got it. I asked Kendall to call an ambulance. By that time, it had become difficult for me to swallow.

  Kendall drove behind the ambulance to the hospital in Greenfield. There the examining doctor said that, because my case seemed to be complex, and because I had such difficulty communicating, he thought I should be in Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, where my own doctor could oversee my treatment. I was too weak and confused to disagree. The doctor said he would telephone my doctor to tell him I was on my way to his office. I didn’t think to ask him why I couldn’t be admitted to Cooley Dickinson immediately, for it was clear to me that I belonged in a hospital, not a doctor’s office.

  No one suggested that I go in an ambulance.

  I lay on the car seat, my head in Kendall’s lap, as she drove me to Northampton. “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning!” she sang while I looked at the tops of trees speeding by. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” she sang as I worked to focus on the music and not what was happening in my newly unpredictable and frightening brain. “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,” she sang while I lay thinking that maybe that was what was happening to me; maybe I was dying. She sang: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.”

  When we got to Dr. Smith’s office, I held on to Kendall’s arm as I walked, dragging my left leg, from the car. Dr. Smith hardly had to look at me to know that I should be admitted to the hospital immediately. He asked his receptionist to get a wheelchair for me. She was a woman I’d known years before when her son and mine had been friends. She was visibly distressed. I tried to communicate to her that I didn’t want to leave for the hospital until I’d contacted my son or daughter-in-law. I was afraid I might die on the way. There was no answer, so she left a message on the answering machine, saying: “Your mother isn’t feeling especially well, so we’re going to have her admitted to the hospital.” Especially well? I could no longer talk, was leaning uncontrollably to the left, while the left side of my mouth hung open and drooped down. I could hardly contain myself until we got out of the office and into the car. I burst out laughing. I felt I might be dying, and she’d told my family that I wasn’t “feeling especially well”?

  I couldn’t stop laughing.

  I don’t remember being admitted to Cooley Dickinson. I don’t remember that first night when Kendall sat beside my bed all night long, holding my hand and stroking my head. She told me that toward morning, I said that I might have to go—meaning to die—and she begged me: “Please, stay. Please, stay.”

  I stayed.

  She telephoned friends for me.

  The next day in Cooley Dickinson, I had a second stroke. I was getting up from the toilet when, losing my balance and the use of my left leg, I lunged for the grab bar on the wall to my right. I remember nothing after that. That stroke completely paralyzed my left side, destroyed my sense of balance, and left me with double vision. It also left me with a condition called left neglect, in which my brain refused to acknowledge anything to my left. I ate only the food on the right side of my plate, read only the page on the right side in a book, talked only to the person seated to my right.

  Overnight half of my world had vanished.

  Weeks before my stroke I had gone to my doctor with a complaint about my eyes. While examining me, he had commented that I seemed to be depressed. He suggested that I take some of the new antidepressant Prozac and gave me some samples. I said that I would think about takin
g them, but I doubted I would. I needed a life change, not a mood change brought about by drugs. For my difficulty with my vision, he made an appointment with an ophthalmologist.

  I went the next day. I explained that in bright light my peripheral vision bleached out. After the doctor examined my eyes he left the room, returning a few minutes later with a large book in which he showed me a photograph of a scene in which the central image was clearly focused while the surrounding images dissolved in what looked like intense sunlight. “Is this what things look like to you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I responded.

  He closed the book and smiled at me. “The good news is that there is nothing wrong with your eyes.”

  He paused like a stand-up comedian about to deliver the punch line. “The bad news is that the problem is in your brain.”

  He went on to tell me that in his opinion, I was experiencing migraines but without the pain.

  Something told me that the difficulty was not that simple. I called my doctor, told him what the ophthalmologist had said, and expressed my concern. He responded that if the problem didn’t clear up soon, I might consider having a CAT scan.

  Now he stood by my hospital bed looking down at me. He must have examined me earlier, but this is my first conscious memory of him after leaving his office for the hospital two days before. Now I had suffered a second stroke. What I saw of the room had holes in it like Swiss cheese.

  My doctor looked puzzled. “Whatever it was that depressed you so severely is gone,” he said. “It’s as if a shadow has been lifted.”

  I had no feeling of a shadow being lifted. But it was true—I was not feeling depressed; I was feeling panic-stricken. I was also beginning to face a major life change, not the kind I’d meant when I’d told the doctor I needed a life change instead of the Prozac he’d offered me, but one that would leave my vision forever changed.

  II

  Kendall sat beside my bed, reading aloud from May Sarton’s memoir After the Stroke, while I drifted into and out of consciousness. A visitor—I’d already forgotten who—had left a little vase of flowers, and a nurse had just taken my blood pressure. Or was that in the morning? My memory was hazy, fragmented. “Head,” I said, touching the right side of my head. “Head.”

  Kendall reached over and stroked my head. The headache wasn’t intolerable yet, only relentless and exhausting.

  Before the strokes, I had had one headache in my life that was severe enough to be memorable. That was in 1959, in our first apartment in West Philadelphia. For the duration of the headache I lay on the daybed in the living room, trapped in pain. My maternal grandmother’s migraines were legendary—occurrences of terrible mystery, silence, and dark rooms. Though I never witnessed one, I’d heard about them all my life. As a child, I’d felt a sense of awe about them; her inaccessibility coupled with my longing for her attention and affection encouraged my romanticizing of anything that was hers. My mother had also had headaches but called them headaches, not migraines, the word that in my child eyes lifted the experience into the realm of the extraordinary. Still, she would moan, “My head is splitting. My head is splitting,” or—on occasion—would slam the back of her head against the wall with great force, as if that self-imposed violence might somehow minimize or at least distract her from the less controllable pain of the headache.

  My second memorable headache came in the hospital after the second stroke, though I don’t remember exactly when or how long it lasted. When I asked my daughter-in-law, Mary, about it, she thought it must have lasted a week or two. She told me that the family was afraid that the stroke had damaged a pain center in my brain and that I could possibly live the rest of my life in that agony. “In that case,” she said, “we were hoping that you would die.” I knew nothing beyond my attempt to endure from one assault on my brain to the next. Each seizure of acute pain brought a rerun of the film of John Kennedy’s assassination—the impact of the bullet exploding the brain. My whole mind was filled with that image.

  But what obsessed me afterward was the thought that the headaches that my sister, Harriet, suffered after she was born were even more painful than my headache, without any medication to dull the pain.

  III

  John Elder stood looking down at me, his right hand thrust open toward me, holding a small gray model of a Mercedes. Later, when my headache finally went away and my mind was clear, I examined the model carefully and saw that it was a little more than six inches long and made of metal. It was exquisite in its fine details—doors that opened, a steering wheel that actually made the front tires turn, and one long windshield wiper that worked. But that day I saw only my son’s expressionless face.

  Expressing himself emotionally had never been easy for John Elder, but somehow the gift of that model car said all that needed to be said. Car was the first word he spoke at eight months, and it was riding in the car that had given him comfort when he was a baby. Cars were one of his major focuses from childhood to the time he made his first drivable car from old car parts to creating his own car business. The Mercedes is one of the cars his company still services and sometimes sells.

  Of all gifts given to me when I was in the hospital, it was that car that I treasured most. Over the years since the stroke, I’ve had many visitors with children, and I’ve always kept a basket full of toys for them. But until John Elder’s son, Jack, was old enough, I allowed no child to play with the little Mercedes.

  When I finally gave Jack the car, I was impressed by how carefully he played with it, pushing it across my kitchen-workroom floor, opening and closing the doors, turning the steering wheel, pushing the windshield wiper back and forth. He was especially fascinated by the windshield wiper. As I watched him push it back and forth over the windshield, I remembered the little boy John Elder spending a long time one afternoon pretending to be windshield wipers. He walked all over our small apartment in West Philadelphia, moving his arms back and forth while repeating the words, “Windshield wipers. Windshield wipers.” He continued this for a long time before he came to me with a look of concern on his face. “Mama,” he asked anxiously. “Am I really windshield wipers?”

  “No, John Elder, you’re not windshield wipers,” I assured him. “You’re a little boy.”

  I gave him a hug and he went off happily to play but no longer pretended to be windshield wipers that day.

  “Can I have some water so I can use the windshield wipers?” Jack asked.

  IV

  John Elder came from South Hadley, and Chris came from New York, where he now lived and worked. Kendall took several photographs of the three of us together. In one, John Elder is seated to my right, the fingers on our right hands interlocked. Chris is to my left, sitting on the bed. In another photograph Chris is supporting my head with his right arm. In both pictures we are all looking into the camera lens. The pose feels formal. But my hair is uncombed and my hospital gown has slipped off my paralyzed left shoulder. The left side of my mouth droops badly. These things make me look vulnerable and sadly comic, while the expressions on my sons’ faces are restrained and sober.

  Later Kendall took more pictures of John Elder and me. We are seated in chairs at the ward hall. My head is propped on a pillow, and my hair is still uncombed. In the first, John Elder is looking into the lens with a slight smile on his face, while I am looking at him and smiling. In the next John Elder is asleep, his right arm across my bent leg, my right hand on his arm.

  Then she took a series of Chris by himself, his expression pensive, his eyes turned away from the camera. His hair is still thick and curly, and his face looks tender and soft. I cherish those pictures. I had no idea then that I would see him only a few times over the next twenty years.

  V

  My speech was broken, and I felt lost in the wreckage in my brain. Each syllable spoken was an exhausting explosion of breath. Talking was slow, difficult to understand, drained of emotion. I left out words, confused tense, gender, and time, saying yesterday when I meant to
day, today when I meant tomorrow, he when I meant she, done when I meant did. Strange inversions of words came out of my mouth uninvited, unexpected. I often used sentence structures that sounded as if I were translating from French. “How many years has she?” I would ask, meaning to say: “How old is she?”

  I puzzled about my strange loss of grammar. I thought about how it would have been were my mother alive to see me. Her speech was as precise and controlled as the public appearance she maintained when I was a young girl in the forties—firmly corseted, with high heels and hose, lipstick, rouge. She never used slang. As a child, I lived in dread of making grammatical errors and having her correct me.

  Inside me, time collapsed and I was once again twelve years old, sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room. Across the room, the large electric fan rotated its caged face, blades stirring the thick August air. Harriet sat in her wheelchair, blond curls damp against her head. While my mother talked with her friend Francis, a small, dark-haired woman with short, tight curls, Francis’s daughter, Kate, raced back and forth across the room, terrible guttural noises—great thrusts and heaves of sound—erupting from her throat.

  Harriet and Kate, both born with cerebral palsy, were the bond that connected the two women—my mother, restrained and proper, Francis, burning with intensity, chain-smoking Pall Mall cigarettes, and talking rapidly about her husband’s heavy drinking, concerns about Kate, or how the world was going to come to an end any day.

  Kate must have been eight or nine years old when we met the Hollingsworths. Already she was a tall, big-boned girl; it would be only a couple of years before she towered over her mother. I was upset by Kate’s banging on the piano with her fists—a fierce thunderous sound that was often accompanied by her loud guttural noises. Then she would rush back and forth across the living room, flinging her arms out, wildly scratching at the air. It was as if she was clawing at some invisible wall, frantic to escape.