Stroke of Insight

I'm reading Jill Bolte Taylor's book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (New York: Viking Penguin Group, 2008).  The author suffered a rare, congenital and traumatic brain aneurysm at the age of 37.  She was a well-known, up and coming neuroscientist with a Harvard Degree and remarkable future prospects.  The aneurysm reduced her to an unspeaking, non-reading, barely walking infant in an adult body.

Her survival was miraculous and a tribute to the power of prompt and competent medical intervention, treatment and care.  Her recovery is a remarkable journey of hope, determination, clarity and simplicity.  Her testimony is remarkable.  

She took the time, energy, and effort with the help of a therapist to reconstruct the actual experience of her stroke from an insider's perspective.  Rather than the uniformly terrifying and macabre experience we might expect, she found it to be a spiritual journey into the peace and tranquility of her right brain, even as her left brain lay awash and traumatized in a flow of blood.  She devotes a chapter in her book to describing the experience in exquisite detail.

In part I read this account to have some little insight into what Anne might have experienced when her own brain was assaulted.  Her brain trauma was in a different location (the mid-brain) with far more devastating consequences.  Nonetheless, I find some comfort in hearing that Jill Bolte Taylor did not experience overwhelming pain or terror as her brain was under attack.  

Instead, she experienced a developing sense of peaceful detachment and connection with the universe.  For Jill Bolte Taylor it was a spiritual experience of grace and peace.  I don't know if Anne had any such experiences as her conscious mind left her.  I hope she did.

A delightful fringe benefit of the book is chapter thirteen, entitled "What I Needed Most."  It is a list of those ways of support she found most helpful.  What I discovered was a list of things--most of which I needed in my early days of recovering from Anne's death.  Let me list a few.

• "I desperately needed people to treat me as though I would recover completely."  I found nothing so debilitating as the "Oh, you poor, poor man" look that I received from so many folks.  It was true, and the sentiment was intended to give love and support.  What I saw, however, was pity rather than empathy, despair rather than hope.

• "My brain needed to be protected from obnoxious sensory stimulation, which it perceived as noise."  I craved alone time to think and process and reflect and rest.  At times I was too isolated and that wasn't good.  It was impossible for people around me to be able to tell when I needed what in this regard.  I'm sorry about that.  But my available mental and emotional resources felt so limited, that most social interaction for a while seemed painfully overwhelming.

• "I needed people to love me--not for the person I had been but for who I might now become."  I am still wrestling with that one a bit.  Others in my life could go back to their lives. I had to choose how to go on in new and different ways.  I didn't always receive support for changing.  I didn't receive support for remaining the same.  It was very confusing.  People with a little distance from me expect me to be the same person and the same pastor I was before all this happened.  I don't think I can do that, and I don't think I want to do that.

• "I needed those around me to be encouraging.  I needed to know I still had value.  I needed to have dreams to work toward."  I felt like I had failed in the biggest test of my life.  I hadn't saved Anne.  It took some months to get over that sentiment and the shame that came with it.  It still sneaks back to get me whenever I feel like I have failed at something else.  My focus on choosing hope is as much personal therapy day to day as it is an effort to share with others.

• "I had to define my priorities for what I wanted to get back the most and not waste energy on other things."  I'll say more about this one downstream, but it is still part of my thinking and deciding.  The loss of a loved one changes a person's priorities.  I disengaged from so much of life for a while.  It is still a daily decision on my part regarding how much to re-engage.

I'll be interested to hear if these statements resonate with others who have experienced traumatic loss or change.  They did for me.