Francis told us that the doctors at Johns Hopkins said that Kate’s brain held no capacity for understanding or making human speech. The horror of being without speech haunted me. My sister couldn’t speak at all either, but she seemed to be able to understand at least a little of what we said. When one or another of us would ask, “Where’s the little boy who looked after the sheep?” she’d close her eyes in response before we’d say, “Under the haystack fast asleep.” I clung to that small indication of communication with my sister. But I can’t remember an instance when Kate appeared to comprehend what anyone said, though she must have understood some of her mother’s communication if not the actual words. Looking back I can only remember her noises and abrupt, disruptive movements. I never saw Kate smile or cry.
I remembered how the first sounds I blurted into the phone receiver when I called Kendall that morning after my stroke sounded like the guttural sounds that I had heard from Kate more than forty years earlier. Hearing myself terrified me. Was that part of my brain that made and understood words being destroyed? Was I going to be like Kate?
Before Mother died, she told me that Kate was living in an institution. She told me that Francis’s husband had left her and had later killed himself, and that Francis herself had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Kate was with her in the car when it happened. Francis’s death was instantaneous. Repeatedly over the years, I replayed what that cataclysmic scene might have been like as the blood broke through its walls and drowned Francis’s brain in its red fury.
I imagined Kate stunned in the aftermath of that car crash. For the twenty years of her life, Francis had been the only person Kate had. It was Francis who cooked three meals a day for the two of them in that large house, Francis who helped Kate bathe and dress. It was Francis who brushed her straight brown hair. It was Francis who took her to the mall and grocery store and every other place she went. Francis was Kate’s world, and Kate was Francis’s.
If the two of them had no bond of speech, what they had was daily life. Whatever of their bond was love, need, responsibility, or making do with what life dealt, I can’t say. And I don’t know how Kate acted in the tumultuous wake of Francis’s death. But I can’t imagine Kate in that car alone with Francis’s body without imagining rising from her depths a heartbreaking howl of sorrow more terrible than any sound she’d ever made before.
VI
My memory of the early days and weeks after my stroke is fragmented and blurred, and I’ve forgotten the proper sequence of things. Kendall’s presence was a constant. She stayed with me day and night. Friends and family came and went. Nurses came with medication, the blood-pressure gauge, and the thermometer. Aides came with changes of linen, meals, and the bedpan. Lab technicians came with their needles and tubes. Physical and occupational therapists came trying to help me do things I was no longer able to do in the old ways.
Confused, disoriented, and with the acute pain in my head barely dulled by drugs, I repeatedly asked my friends to please bring me pens and notebooks. I’d lost so much of who I was and was frantic to hold on to what I had left. All feeling was absent from my left side. I felt like I had half of the body of a corpse attached to the living me.
Speech as I had known it was gone. But with shattered syntax, senseless repetitions and omissions of words, and bizarre spelling, I could still write. More than anything else, I clung to words.
Kendall brought me a new journal—a sturdy hard-backed account book, green, with lined paper. On May 10, I wrote my first journal entry:
I feel so helpless … hurt my face trying to sleep … I have a bad headache and my head hurts and my head aches. Also, I need my glasses. I am very sad and feel like crying. I close my eyes and think: I must learn patience.
Feeling helpless was what upset me most. When no friend or family member was with me and I wasn’t engaged in speech, physical, or occupational therapy, I felt like the baby I had been, helpless and alone, screaming in a closed room.
On May 16, I wrote a fragment of a poem in my journal:
Spring rain on the windowpane. Trees,
gray sky. And listen—
I can call back the day
that you pushed me in the wheelchair
in the park. Stones, I say.
And moss. Fragrance of fresh earth.
An additional line has been scratched through, and the poem was left unfinished. But I’d discovered what I needed to know—I could find a way to comfort and calm myself when I was alone. If the hospital felt unbearable to me, if I felt trapped and anxious in my body, I could “call back the day.” I could remember what comforted and nourished me and give it the form of poetry. The outing in the park referred to in the poem was my first outing in the wheelchair after the stroke. Kendall had pushed me across the street from the hospital to Childs Park. Because the muscles were too paralyzed to hold the bone in, my left arm hung out of the socket. To ease the pain and to keep the bone in its socket, a couple of bed pillows supported my arm.
Spring had come since I’d been admitted to Cooley Dickinson, and I was alive. Kendall pushed the wheelchair close enough for me to reach out and touch an open blossom on a Japanese magnolia tree. I tenderly caressed a deep, wine-colored petal the way one might touch the soft spot on a new baby’s head. Kendall walked across the new grass to a dogwood tree, broke off a small, blossom-covered branch, and brought it back to me, laying it on top of the pillows. Looking down at the blossoms, I clamped my hand over my mouth and wept.
Sometimes, on days when my own determination was weakened, I remembered the story of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a story I’d shared with the women in creative writing workshops that I’d led. Carolina, with a second-grade education and two children to support, lived in the slums near São Paulo, Brazil, where she made her meager living by collecting and selling used scrap paper that she found by searching through that city’s trash. Believing in the power of her own words against all odds, she wrote a journal that was later published as the book Child of the Dark. That book, with the exception of the Bible, has sold more copies than any other book in Brazil’s history. I told myself that if Carolina could write herself out of a place of poverty and helplessness, then I could write myself out of a place of panic and fear.
During my month in Cooley Dickinson and two months in the Weldon Rehabilitation Hospital at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, I wrote about any and everything. I wrote about waiting for visitors, seeing a summer-sun-lit sky through my window, my fear of falling in the bathroom, the monotonous drone of the floor waxer up and down the halls. I wrote about other patients and their visitors, the anxiety that kept me up nights and woke me early in the morning; I wrote about my roommate’s blue fish in its small cup of water, the wall of leg braces at the far end of the therapy gym, the little paper angel with its bent foot that dangled from a cord on the small TV over my bed.
VII
I wheeled myself down the hospital corridor for my first appointment with Angela Mansolillo, my speech therapist at Weldon Rehab. I stopped abruptly at the doorway to her office. I couldn’t make myself cross the threshold into that small, windowless space. Breathe deeply, I told myself, trying to do my childbirth breathing exercise, an exercise I’d since used to calm myself before giving poetry readings. Breathe deeply. But I could hardly breathe at all. Maybe, I thought, I am suffocating; maybe fear has sucked all the air from my lungs.
“I can’t work in this room,” I blurted out.
I don’t know what Angela was thinking about the newly paralyzed, panic-stricken woman facing her from a hospital wheelchair, but she didn’t attempt to reason me out of my fears. She simply smiled warmly and assured me that she would find a space in which I would feel comfortable. The next day we met in the computer room behind the nurses’ station. The room wasn’t large, but it was flooded with light from a large window. Every day for the next two months, for thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon, I sat next to that window as I worked with Angela, learnin
g to speak again.
Initially there were a lot of written tests, though I can remember nothing of them now except that I disliked taking them. I felt like a little child in grade school, nervous about performing well for the teacher. And I told no one that I could no longer remember the alphabet.
Speaking, I rolled my r’s, and at each syllable uttered, I spat like an actor in the No theater in Japan. Though I had spoken with a thick Southern drawl before my stroke, I now spoke with what sounded like a trace of a German accent. And my new speech was squeezed dry of emotion. It sounded flat and mechanical and was punctuated with struggle-filled hesitations. Often I would kid Angela about going on the road to give poetry readings in this style as if it were something purposefully developed for my performance. In truth I couldn’t imagine ever again giving public readings.
To lose my ability to walk was to lose all sense of safety. Who would come when I needed to be propped up in the bed so I wouldn’t choke on a sip of water, or when I needed a bedpan or a blanket? To lose use of my left arm and hand felt like a cruel amputation. But I have always been in love with the human voice, with its tonal variations, hesitations, cadences, with what it holds of the geography of one’s beginnings and of the experiences that lead one to choose the particular words through which one lives. I needed my leg. I needed my arm. I needed my hand. But in a fundamental way I was my voice. The loss of that voice felt like a diminishment of my soul.
A booklet explaining apraxia lay under a pile of books where I’d hidden it. As long as I didn’t read it, as long as I didn’t put words to what had happened to my voice, my own acknowledgment of it didn’t have to cut so deeply. In the meantime, I spent evenings in bed, pronouncing the words with which I’d had the most difficulty that day—countenance, munificent, ignorance, diminished, eloquent. I stumbled over sounds, slurred, stuttered, began again.
Six weeks after my stroke, I got the booklet out and read its definition of apraxia: “A movement planning problem involving a disruption in sequencing of voluntary movements. A transmission problem between the brain and the muscle.” Apraxia, I said aloud, allowing myself to feel the pain evoked at the sound of that word. I rolled my wheelchair to the empty dining room and parked at a table near a window. Taking out my pad and pen, I labored to write a poem expressing my struggle to find “music to unlock my damaged speech.”
One afternoon when Kendall came to visit, as she did most afternoons, she took me out for a ride around the hospital grounds. As she pushed my wheelchair around the parking lot, she began to sing the song “Side by Side.” The mood was light, and the words to the song felt poignant, funny, and true. She and I had stood side by side through one of the most difficult periods of both of our lives and were both more than a little ragged from the effort. Kendall continued to sing. Laughing, I tried to join in.
Though what I was doing could hardly be called singing, and though my words were much slower in coming out than hers and were not at all clearly spoken, they were the first words since the stroke that I was able to say without wrestling each syllable out of my mouth.
I knew that the music had made this possible. Perhaps I could get my speech back through reading rhythmical poetry. And as difficult as it was to speak, it made sense to me to practice speaking by reading what I’d loved most.
I have never returned the copy of The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse that Kendall brought when I asked her for poetry I could use in speech therapy. A 1955 edition, the book looks much older. The paper is yellowed and brittle, and some animal has chewed through the binding. The second page of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence” has come loose. I couldn’t begin to say how many speech-therapy sessions began with All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood.
Because of the music of the poem I was able to read it aloud more easily than most things. I would read as far in its six pages of small print as my energy allowed, while Angela sat listening, helping me with pronunciation, making a list of the words with which I had the most difficulty. Then I would take the list back to my room and practice them.
There were other books of poetry from which I read. Just yesterday, when I took my copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry from its shelf, one of Angela’s lists fell out. Reading the list—argument, tedious, chimney, revisions, decisions, scuttling—I remembered reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which, until my stroke, I had not read in many years. I also read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” Glory be to God for dappled things, I read, struggling, spitting, tripping over words until at the very end I was able get out the final Praise him with relative clarity.
Sometimes, trying to find my way in my damaged brain felt like trying to find my way in a darkened carnival fun house where nothing at all made sense. More than once I recoiled in shame, silence, and confusion after mistaking Angela’s left hand for mine as she turned a page of the book in front of me. My own hand lay in my lap, still and forgotten by my brain, my brain that had also forgotten my son’s phone number, many familiar words, what letter came after Q in the alphabet, and much of the left side of my world.
Sitting across from Angela in the small computer room next to the nurses’ station, I asked: “Will I ever be able to speak without so much effort?” I had spent half an hour reading to her, while she wrote a list of the words I had trouble with. She looked me in the eyes and answered with honesty and warmth: “I don’t know.”
One day I took Kendall’s paperback anthology outside with us. After months of work, I was going to try to read Millay’s “Renascence” aloud, and my mind could hold nothing beyond that intention. Kendall pushed my wheelchair outside and parked it facing a bench on which she seated herself. The book opened naturally to that poem into which I’d poured so much of myself. I gripped the pages between the thumb and fingers of my right hand and—after looking into Kendall’s clear blue eyes for an instant—began to read.
“All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood,” I began. And continued, line after line, page after page, while words from Angela’s word lists filled my mind—shrinking sight, immensity, remorse, undefined, swirled, omniscience.
“I know not how such things can be! / I breathed my soul back into me,” I read. Like Millay’s narrator, I too felt that I had tasted my own death, and the coming back. By loss of hope, I too had seen my vision limited. And I had known the heartbreaking beauty of that first spring after my stroke when I wept aloud at the sight of a bough of dogwood blossoms that Kendall broke from the tree and placed on my lap like a prayer. The world stands out on either side, I read. No wider than the heart is wide. Tears were streaming down Kendall’s face. I read the last lines and took a deep breath. The poem was over.
I was still in a wheelchair. My left leg was still paralyzed. I did not have enough balance to stand without help. My left arm hung limp at my side. I was unable to move my hand. But I could read poetry aloud again. Not smoothly, not with the inflection that I wanted, not rapidly enough, and the words weren’t always clear. But I had just read all six pages of “Renascence” aloud to Kendall. I felt as if I had been given wings.
VIII
It was early morning, just after breakfast and medications. I waited with other patients in wheelchairs lined up at the door of the therapy gym, some with artificial limbs laid across their laps. Others were paralyzed, mouths wordless and twisted. One old man stared out coldly. He would never look anyone in the eyes again. One young woman could no longer hold up her head. The man with one eye sewn shut talked to the man with a stump where his right hand had been. This could be hell. Or the purgatory of an unkind god. Or simply life. No more extraordinary than oceans. Or a single crab crawling across the sand. Or the last labored breath of the man in 402, his IV and oxygen disconnected, the day nurse coming on duty.
Soon the therapists arrived. Each gripped the handles of a wheelchair and pushed her patient to an exercise mat, a stationary bicycle
, parallel bars, or a table filled with objects used in exercises to improve coordination. My therapist pushed me to the standing box. She helped me up from my wheelchair and into the box, where I stood as she locked me in. She told me that she’d be back in five minutes to release me and help me back into my wheelchair. I stood locked in the standing box, watching her walk away.
The standing box was exactly that—a tall, narrow box just large enough for me to stand in without room to fall. It came up to just above my waist. My paralyzed hand dangled at my side, while my functioning right hand steadied me in the box. I’d been locked in it in order to begin to regain the balance that the stroke took away. Here I could observe the other patients. Here I could stand without fear of falling. No one said a word. The room was filled with the thick silence of people whose damaged brains and bodies had no energy left for words as we struggled to do our work.
A gray-haired woman seated at a table moved a stack of cardboard cones one by one from her left side to her right, then back again. Her trembling hand moved like a great iron claw, mechanical and slow. A man in a hospital gown and slippers pushed pegs into a pegboard, took them out again. Another woman raised and lowered her left arm, raised and lowered her left arm. Everything here was done in slow motion and was repeated like an action repeated forever on a factory assembly line somewhere where there was no visible end product. Theater of the absurd. The phrase came to mind, and I searched my memories of the sixties to try to remember a play I saw then. But I couldn’t recall the play, only the feelings of disorientation and despair that it evoked.
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