The Long Journey Home (41 page)

When I told Kendall I was returning to Massachusetts, she invited me to stay with her until I found a place of my own.

I hired a taxi to drive me from San Miguel to the Mexico City airport. I asked the driver if it would be possible to stop at the basilica to see Our Lady of Guadalupe, but he said he thought there wouldn’t be time. I was disappointed to not see it again. Then my driver turned a corner and I was surprised to see in the distance the ornate, sixteenth-century church, its front even more sunken into the earth than it was the last time I’d seen it.

When the taxi driver smiled, I realized he’d been determined to get me there all along. But I was puzzled when he drove past the building and turned into the parking garage of a round, very modern church. He explained that the old basilica had been condemned, and the new basilica had taken its place. The painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe was now displayed there.

Light poured through the many windows of the new church. The
painting hung on a wall under which crowds of people passed on a conveyor belt. I joined them and found my heart moved once again by the image of the Virgin with her gentle face, clasped hands, her robe scattered with stars. And though the feeling of sacred mystery I experienced when I first saw her in the old basilica, with its dimly lit interior, was gone, I was once again reminded that I too am part of the Divine.

While my doctor in Northampton assured me that I didn’t have lupus, I knew that something was wrong with me. And going back to teaching felt impossible. Whatever was wrong, I knew I needed more rest.

Memories of Shelburne Falls and the Deerfield River tugged at me. Kendall announced to her classes at Smith that I was looking for an apartment by the river in Shelburne Falls. One of her students knew of such a place and told Kendall. I called the landlady of the apartment building, and we arranged to meet each other there.

The apartment was much too small, but it had a large porch overlooking the river. Because of the porch, and because I intended to stay there for only a year, I decided to take it.

I had left much of my furniture and many of my books at John Elder’s, but I brought my favorite reading chair, my computer, and the computer table Kendall had given me. I also brought the antique kitchen table I’d bought when I’d first moved to Northampton. In the new apartment I put it under the window overlooking the river and used it as a desk as well as a place to eat. Then I settled into living in Shelburne Falls, which held the same attraction for me that it had held originally. But I continued to feel tired. And as the days and weeks passed, I found myself growing more and more depressed. I joined the YMCA in Greenfield and swam laps in the pool there four
or five times a week. I wrote in my journal. I tried unsuccessfully to meditate. Time after time I tried to stop smoking, only to give in and light another cigarette, which only made me feel more depressed.

I found the most relief from depression during the time I spent in a small store across the river. Just as I had felt something in the air that drew me to Shelburne Falls, there was something in the atmosphere in the store that made me feel secure and spiritually comforted.

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.

I
‘D RETURNED THAT DAY FROM A SHORT VACATION ON
C
APE
C
OD 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 taking 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.

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.