When we left the hospital, I had hoped that, as soon as she was surrounded by familiar objects, she’d start to remember. In addition, I was absolutely sure that she’d now begin to recall new events, and that this would begin to build her new memory. When she’s surrounded by familiar faces, I thought, we’ll conquer her forgetfulness. But that didn’t happen. Familiar faces no longer calm her. “They remember me while I was in hospital, but I don’t remember that. Everyone else now knows more about my life than I do. I’m a stranger to myself. I’m Camus’s Outsider.”
It’s clear that the state of her right arm has gotten worse, the sensitivity of her hand has been reduced so that she often burns herself on the gas flame when she’s cooking, or she cuts herself, which is a serious problem, because she’s taking blood thinners, which make the healing process more difficult. Today I told her: “It’s hard to stop our bleeding.” I talk about her in the plural; instead of saying she, I say we. I have identified myself with her state. Yesterday I bought two boxes of Band-Aids of various sizes. The pressure in her arm is sometimes so powerful that she gives up on everything. My care, even my presence in the same room now bother her. I go to my desk, but she follows me almost immediately, because she thinks I’m angry, and asks: “Would you like me to make you some tea?” And that shatters me.
Earlier (“before the stroke”), she defended her right to solitude, she’d go to the bedroom after dinner and watch her films on her own. When I chided her for that, she’d say she had a “cat’s nature,” solitary . . . But now she’s sociable, if I go away, if I’m at my desk, writing, she invents little diversions to encourage me to talk. She’s forgotten many events from the past, now she’s discovering the world all over again and showing a child’s curiosity about it.
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“What do you think about Jesus?”
That’s the kind of unexpected question she starts a conversation with.
She asks: “What do you think about butterflies? I think they’re beautiful, but they frighten me when I see them up close . . .”
She’s become highly entertaining company.
A hot day, extremely humid. We set off to buy coffee filters. It’s getting dark, the heat isn’t easing. And before we parted company in the parking lot, because I’m irritable in this heat, she said: “You go and sniff books, do something for your soul!” She went to get the filters, while I went into a bookshop and bought a book. Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it was made into a fine film, I saw it about ten years ago, and the time has come now for me to read it. It’s about a man who’s paralyzed, after experiencing “a massive stroke.”