Patricia Thompson Collamer


Strokeday

On a sunny late spring day, my mother’s brain attacked itself. In an instant her battle with stroke began. One syllable and six letters seems simple. What follows is nothing but complicated. We’ll never know the number of attacks. Was it one, two, three, more? It doesn’t matter. Medical records document the powerful, chaotic, and inescapable electrified battle that raged inside her brain.

Complicated and dramatic, just like her 82-year life, she suffered both forms of the most common strokes: hemorrhagic and ischemic. I looked up these two strange words on WebMD. Neither had been torn off my Word-A-Day calendar. Neither were in my family lexicon nor my book of crossword puzzle hints. This was the first brain attack in the family.

Countless vocabulary words have introduced themselves over the past seven years. I located some in the pages of an outdated Keeton Biological Sciences text still on my shelf from undergraduate days. I found others in a pharmacology text decaying in my basement, pages stuck fast by mold and time.

Between mini- and maxi- crises I spent time reviewing that vocabulary list, assigning pop self-quizzes on the definition and application of each one.

If that sounds tiring, it is. But when I am tired, I know I am alive. Being alive seems peculiarly important.

My days were spent rewinding and fast-forwarding time. I lived few moments in anything my yoga mates would consider the present. Finding myself in that space of exposed reality, I was pierced with insecurity. During times of unsettled weariness in mornings and evenings, I mentally articulated and sulked over my circumstances. Caffeinated afternoons reminded me even more could be lost.
Being tired and wired pre-empted me from living in the moment.

I gradually created a ledger in my mind. The bold-faced heading at the top read “My Pseudo-perspective on the Balance of Living.” Rows and columns represented proportionate losses and gains. Close inspection revealed how unreconciled my life had become.

The imbalance was the result of perpetual revisions to three new paramount values.
Movement was the first value on the list and remained unwavering in its magnitude of importance. My appreciation for motion became an obsession. From the reflex to scratch a tickle under my right pinkie toe to the audible grind in my left knee. Every muscle, joint, and nerve should be exercised, strengthened.

Keep moving, keep moving. This was my mantra. Two words, easily understood. They disconnected overloaded circuits in my mind. They stopped the racing questions and cleared a path for hopeful energy. They focused and calmed my thoughts. No prayer written or recited could do better.

This value became most important after four minutes of earthly (otherwise unnoticed) time when my mother’s physical abilities started to dissolve. Any family experiencing stroke has added this reality to the oxygen which surrounds and sustains their lives. They know one small fall can mean movement is lost—forever.

Family was the second weighty contributor to the imbalance of my mental ledger. I don’t mean the unending ancestry.com quest for names, locations, dates, and relations. I mean the unplanned, cumulative living we call family.

My mother and father had five children. Our household was not calm, never quiet, and charged with competition. We shared unique traditions and very old relatives. We grew up utterly bothered by one another. Of course we schemed and dreamed about leaving home and living on our own. Until then we belonged together. We teased and argued. We laughed and cried. We understood family.

Routine was the third value on my lopsided ledger. It gave me the perception of control. I could seek to interrupt, to change, or to ignore it. I lived in its shadow of potential.

After physical changes limit a person—and coincidently all those around them—routine fades then disappears.

My instinct was to fabricate a new order as temporary substitute. Over the past seven plus years, unanticipated change became the routine. All things planned could be—and frequently were—altered with a single phone call. It became impossible to stay in the present moment when routine collapsed around me as quickly as it was constructed.

So, I arranged life to bring balance to my ledger. I strained to pull back time, to manipulate and plan the order of things, to regain a sense of control. Any control.

The absence of control implies powerlessness. Powerlessness promotes self-doubt. Those columns of gains and losses on my mental ledger remained imbalanced.

To contrive a sense of power I perpetually prepared myself for unknown circumstances. Rational decisions might be required in a moment, or an hour, and must be set into motion. I needed to be ready, for anything, any time.

All plans included movement. It trumped all other values.

I chose to avoid focusing on monotonous details of daily living. Rather, I blanketed my thoughts with comfort, joy, pain, and sadness by paging through my own history. Collecting words and ordering them to describe my mom enabled me to somehow save her. She had lived over 89 years, more than 32,850 days of being. Most of those were lived in motion, and with much emotion.

The process of reduction began for Mom on that day of cranial warfare. I quickly discovered it was unrealistic and ineffective to retrieve or recreate her life. Or any lives as they had been. I love my mom and only wish I could. Instead, the objective of preserving our lives together on these pages began.
Like all special days recorded on the calendar, her strokeday is part of my family’s unfolding history.

Perhaps all these simply ordered words can do is to keep me with her, with Grace.

Thanks for reading!
Patty



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