One Hundred Names...

I finished recently Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names for Love, the story of her husband's stroke and his recovery from it. Paul West, a writer (I'm just now reading his pre-stroke The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, and can attest to his love of words), suffered aphasia, the loss of the ability to retrieve his words . Ackerman is herself a writer, particularly of natural history (Dawn Light, et al), and so her account of the experience is full of anecdote, shot through with scientific and medical information, empathic, funny, touching. It's a hard story, but it has turned out better than feared. What did I know about stroke before I read this? Very little. In this account I learned how alarming it is and also what can be hoped for.

Reflecting on the book this morning, I was struck by how Ackerman wove the themes of hospitality (e.g. worrying about and caring for her husband), friendship (e.g. playful conversations with him) and exploration (e.g. understanding the processes of brain responses to trauma) through the entire book. She moves smoothly and often between these--now talking about the challenge of his eating without choking, now her delight in his piropos (pet names of endearment or invitation), now speculations of how his brain had compensated when particular faculties reappeared, now the effect on her outlook of the responsibility for caregiving, now the pride she felt in his resumption of writing, now the lessons she learned about dealing with aphasia—and all a voice cool but clearly caring.  

Thinking about this story in terms of the words hospitality, friendship and exploration—the practices of God-in-love—I don't feel I am diminishing the story or cramming it into inappropriate categories. Instead such a story fills out and beautifully exemplifies these multidimensional words, extending their implications. The life is not in the words, of course, but in the living encounter, occasion by occasion, evolving over 5 years (and up till now) of two individuals who, by virtue of a brain catastrophe suffered by one, find the way they are Other to each other (and themselves) changes suddenly, radically. How they stay engaged, manage the losses, find new areas of richness in their relationship, is a narrative of love at its most concrete and most transcendent.  

I want to think of this story as partaking in the cosmic interchange of God-in-love and the beloved Other. Someone else may not think of it that way, but I want to fit this story and other such stories and all similar stories, now or ever, into something larger and longer-lasting. Ackerman sees this account as reflecting the inescapable poignancy of life, beautiful and brutal at the same time. Yes, yes, but it seems to me there's something more; her openness (and her husband's) are a window into and a contribution to the deep processes that have brought (and will bring) all things into being.

Yesterday's post had me risking hospitality in some encounter since. Nothing yet, unless I include listening patiently to someone's recitation of anxieties, angers, despairs, until the mood passes. Still I'm alert to new opportunities..  

Let's try again: the die turns up 2, an act of friendship, while paying attention to power being exercised. Some relevant words: visiting, appreciating, grieving, refreshing..., and authorizations or prohibitions, helping or hindering. Okay, I can try risking an act of friendship.