Different Strokes

A stroke is a serious life-threatening medical condition that happens to someone you love when the blood supply to part of their brain is cut off.

I spent a lot of last week composing and sending variations of this message...

(details redacted for privacy)

Right now my own brain is a swirling soup of memories and blank spots concerning a different stroke, 25-30 years earlier.

I can’t remember why granddad is babysitting my little brother and me this evening. I can’t remember it being a normal thing. I remember that every time he comes over he brings us a selection of biscuits wrapped in paper kitchen towel. One stack for me. One for my little brother. I remember 3 biscuits per stack. I can’t remember if we both get the same biscuits. I think they come from this sampler box.

I like the wafer one, and the hundreds and thousands one. I like the spiky coconut one but we have whole packets of them in the cupboard so they’re not special. The shortbread one is worse than a slap in the face.

I don’t remember grandad bringing us biscuits tonight.

Is he a last minute ring-in?

I remember grandad chasing us round the couch with his walking stick.

That can’t be right. He doesn’t need the stick until later - until after the stroke he’s going to have later this evening. Why is he chasing us? We are naughty kids. I bet we won’t go to bed. He sounds angry. Like he wants to smack us. But we’re laughing. We can’t be scared. Grandad has never smacked us. Not that I remember.

Now I’m older, and have nephews the same age as my little brother and I were back then, I know it’s not hard to catch young boys running round a couch.

Is grandad playing with us?

I can’t remember the resolution to this incident. I guess we go to bed?

Grandad drives home that night. He lives 40 minutes away.

Does he tell my parents he chased us round the couch? I don’t know.

I do know that after he gets home, he has a stroke.

It's late at night. Or early the next morning. Perhaps he has just walked in door. Perhaps he’s fixing himself a late-night cuppa. Perhaps he wakes up at night feeling odd and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. He collapses.

I remember grandad's kitchen.

He's prostrate on the linoleum (?) floor. It’s a small kitchen. The small kitchen of an old man who lives alone. Cupboard on one side (to his left I guess, I imagine he's lying on his front) where he keeps his biscuits and paper kitchen towels. Sink on the other side, where he keeps an electric can opener fixed to the wall. You put a can on it somehow, and press a button maybe, and the can spins around and the lid pops off. I can’t remember seeing one before or since.

I'm standing in the same spot now, some years later, after grandad dies. I'm helping to clean out his apartment. I'm looking at his yellow fridge, to the right of the cupboard. I have a wet cloth. I wipe the yellow fridge. I reveal a pure white streak through layers of cigarette smoke.

The clock rewinds. 5 years? It's night. Grandad is lying on the linoleum (?) floor. Now I imagine he's lying on his back. Trying to reach up and over his head for the landline telephone on the kitchen counter right behind him, facing the lounge.

I think it was one of these.

Or has he given up? Is he trying to sleep it off? Whatever it is. Come on. He's semi-conscious. He must know he's had a stroke. He is utterly alone. He must feel utterly alone. How does he think this will end?

Good God. Oh my God.

How can he not be scared?

The telephone will ring repeatedly through the morning.

It’s just out of reach. It's impossible to reach. I can’t remember who’s calling. My aunt I think. My parents maybe? To ask how my little brother and I behaved last night? It rings several times. Eventually my aunt will go over to check on him. Or she'll ring and ask the neighbour to. But if it was only 7 hours after he got home round 10pm that would mean he's found at 5am? That must be wrong. Either he stroked later, or he lay longer. Something’s wrong with my memory or my information.

I can’t remember exactly how he was found.

Fast forward to last week.

My - doesn’t live near anyone who would ring and ring and ring and ring and then go round to check.

It was a different stroke.

Thank God it was a different stroke.

It only occurred to me that I might have played a role in our grandad’s stroke many years later…

I suspect he was dead by then. That's how I could tell it as a funny story. A wee party piece to ha ha ha.

The night my little brother and I made our grandad have a stroke!

But I never seriously believed it. It was just a funny story.

When will this become a funny story? Can I just fast forward to then, now?

In the meantime I'm in my own small imagination, lying on the floor (linoleum?).

Something's happened to someone I love. Something's happened to me.

What the fuck do I do now?