When I was 47, my life changed with one phone call. My mother had suffered a serious stroke. She was stricken with aphasia, a condition that permanently garbles speech and limits the ability to understand others.
I left my job-“temporarily.” I moved in with my parents, five hundred miles away, to help my father care for her.
Four months later, my dad suffered a stroke even more devastating than my mom’s. His speech and memory were impaired. Worse, he was paralyzed on the right side.
I was now responsible for caring for both my parents. Nothing in my previous experience as a writer or college professor had prepared me for the challenges and burdens now falling on me.
Three and a half years later, I’m still here, living in their home, caring each day for the special pair of stroke victims who are my parents. Stroke patients have unique needs when it comes to mental stimulation.
My mom is working on her writing today. She’s filling a page with “meaningless” cursive, loops and slashes that fail to resemble any known letters. But like her speech, her writing has crucial meaning to her, and she’s working assiduously, her glasses sliding down her nose as she pilots the pen across the page.
Her writing is good exercise for her mind and coordination, so I encourage her to fill several pages a day. She isn’t “demented”-a person without a mind couldn’t do this. The writing part of the brain, though impaired, continues to exist and function, like the damaged transmitter on a satellite that’s been hit by space debris.
When I was four years old, I would sit on the floor next to my mother’s sewing desk while she worked. On discarded pattern paper, I would use a crayon to imitate cursive writing. It looked like the writing my mother does now. Another role reversal.
My father, meanwhile, is working with his wooden alphabet puzzle. Next he’ll assemble his wooden bears puzzle-you get to dress Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Daughter Bear, and Son Bear in different clothes. I have all kinds of puzzles and games for my dad. They help him with mental and manual dexterity.
When he’s done with the bears, I pick them up and show them to my mom. She responds by raising her page of scribbles. “I did mine too!”
Whenever she completes a page, she refuses to let anyone but me handle it. I must put it away for her at once. We keep all of her writing on a folder on a bookshelf, next to my published books and the magazines where my work has appeared.
I pick up the folder and show it to my cousin. “Look, my mom writes more than I do.”
What the world calls “dementia” is not full or partial, but fluid. It comes and goes with circumstances and situations, containing flashes of great lucidity, moments of coded statements that must be interpreted, chasms of the unknowable, and the drama of recalcitrance.
My parents and the millions like them live primarily in the moment. Isn’t this the goal of all of the world’s spiritual practices, from meditation to Zen Buddhism to Twelve Step work?
My parents aren’t insane-they’re living in an advanced spiritual state. The future and the past are illusions for them, as they should be for us. The only day that can ever exist is today. My parents have achieved this existential enlightenment without having to think about it. It is a gift that has come from illness.