This morning I was "house-cleaning" my Word Documents and made the following discovery-the review of Ron's book which was published in the Vancouver Sun and 5 other major Canadian papers in September 2016 . Since it was published before I began this blog I thought I should reproduce it now for those who might have missed it.
Riding the Wild Horse, Memory
Ron Smith, The Defiant Mind: Living Inside A Stroke
(Ronsdale Press,
2016, 313 pages, $22.95)
Two years ago my father-in-law had a
stroke. One day he was fine, talkative, alert and chuffed by his recent prowess
at the curling rink. The next morning as he ate breakfast, he began to talk
gibberish and was rushed to the hospital. Several small strokes ensued. He
never recovered his ability to explain what was going on inside during those
heart-breaking final days, a terrifying situation for him and for his
loved-ones. Even his wife, a trained nurse, knew little about the workings of a
brain shattered by stroke. If we had read Ron Smith’s The Defiant Mind: Living Inside A Stroke, I think we might all have
responded differently.
The
cover painting, Jack Shadbolt’s “Bursting Orb,” perfectly evokes the central
message of this important literary memoir, that a stroke is not just about
physical damage, loss of speech, motor skills, even the capacity to swallow;
it’s equally, or perhaps more importantly, about what is happening in and to
the mind that experiences such trauma.
“Was
that really me speaking I wondered. It was my voice, it sounded a lot like an
old 78 phonograph record spinning at 331/3 rpm. The words rolled and
bounced around the room like tumbleweed blown on a desert wind. They had no
traction, no weight, no body. No meaning. And yet they seemed heavy and thick
at the same time. Like toffee or treacle.”
Smith’s
sense of humour and gift of metaphor makes this frightening journey into
uncharted waters not only instructive, but also very engaging, a work that
everyone should red, not only because a quarter of us will suffer a stroke by
the age of 80, or be closely associated with someone who has, but also because
it’s so damn well written.
This book
documents loss, confusion, grief and longing, but it’s also about a
bloody-minded determination to understand the cognitive damage suffered and how
that understanding might be crucial to whatever healing and recovery are possible.
What seems to Smith the most reliable compass for rediscovering who he is or
was turns out to be memory. This is no pleasant stroll down memory lane.
Instead, with his body half-paralyzed and senses hyper-alert, Smith rides the
wild horse of memory, hanging on for dear life, grabbing hold of unexpected
moments from his past, patching together what he can of a lost identity, a
Catch-22 process because acknowledging the difference between past and present
selves can also be extremely debilitating.
As a writer of
poetry, fiction and non-fiction, this must have seemed to Smith very much like
the creative process itself, which Joseph Conrad described as rescue work,
“snatching the vanishing fragments of memory and giving them the permanence of
art.” And, indeed, what he has achieved in this epic endeavour—not just
dredging the past, but analysing, processing and recording it all on the
computer with the index finger of his left hand—is no small miracle; indeed,
it’s a tribute to the human will and imagination.
Every stroke is
different, Smith insists, all the more reason why attention needs to be paid to
what is happening to the mind whose “executive function” has been damaged.
“Everyone could see the physical damage I’d
suffered and they clearly had some idea of how best to deal with it, but no one
appeared to be the least bit interested in my mental state of being. No one
asked what my thoughts were or where they led. No one questioned me about the
landscape and atmosphere of the stroke world. No one wanted to know its
secrets.” Happily, with the help of this beautiful, moving and resourceful
book, all that could begin to change.
Ron Smith has
re-learned how to speak, write, walk, even swallow his favourite treat—apple
sauce—but the one thing he refuses to swallow is the idea of giving up.
Gary Geddes is
the author of The Resumption of Play
and the forthcoming Medicine Unbundled:
Dispatches from the Indigenous frontlines.
