The Long Journey Home (43 page)

“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, learning 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.

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.

The therapist said I must stand here a full five minutes.

The far wall was a pegboard hung with leg braces and plastic legs, quad canes and straight canes, walkers. Dust motes floated in the slant of afternoon sun that fell through the window, and I was mesmerized by the motion of these thousands and thousands of particles. Watching them, I remembered standing in my grandfather’s bedroom when I was young. The window shade was half-closed and, except for one slant of sun, my grandfather’s room was dark. I stood there, stilled by amazement at my discovery of the dust particles. Looking at them, I lost all sense of time. It was as if they would be forever suspended there, as I would be left forever standing on the slanting floor in that old house with its wallpaper roses and cobwebs.

“Margaret,” the therapist said, and I jumped, startled at the sound of my own name calling me back from childhood. “Margaret. Your five minutes are up,” she said, and unlocked the back of the box.

I turned around carefully and took her outstretched hand.

Gripping the bar to my right, I walked slowly, swinging my rigid left leg to the side while my spastic left arm drew itself up hard against my chest, hand knotted into a tight fist. Each step required my total concentrated attention. But I could finally walk the full length of the parallel bars that stood at the far end of the therapy gym. Now Loire, my physical therapist, was telling me that it was time to try walking with a cane. I felt terrified.

Immediately after she dismissed me, I wheeled myself to the office of Dr. Jones, the music therapist with whom I’d worked to control the anxiety that woke me mornings and kept me from falling asleep nights. Dr. Jones had bright, kind eyes and a soothing voice. She also had a pleasant office—photographs of flowers on the wall, plants in the window, music and meditation tapes, and a comfortable reclining chair. Being in her office brought relief from the impersonality of the ward’s gym, dining room, nurses’ station, and the long hall that someone was forever polishing.

Dr. Jones steadied me as I moved from my wheelchair to the reclining chair. Then she put a tape in the tape deck and instructed me to close my eyes and breathe deeply. I had many times led writing groups in similar guided relaxation meditations. It felt good to follow someone else’s guidance. I began to relax.