The Long Journey Home (42 page)

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.

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.

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.

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
today, 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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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
.