What my stroke taught me (2017)

In my memories of the Scottish hospital, the sky is always blue, though I know that can’t be completely accurate. Summer was waning, and as my friends and I had already experienced, Edinburgh was prone to unpredictable storms. Yet, I can’t think of a single moment of rain in the two weeks I lay in bed. My morphine-soaked haze only allowed glimpses and fragments: the bracing air coming in from an open window, the rough comfort of my mother’s fingers wiping my fever-moist brow, my father’s tears. All of that must have been confusing to me, but when I think of this time, I remember more clarity than confusion. I remember the Quiet. This was not a Quiet I had known before. It was a placid current, a presence more than an absence. Everything I saw or touched or heard pulsed with a marvelous sense of order. I had a nothing mind, a flotsam mind. I was incredibly focused on the present, with very little awareness or interest in my past or future. My entire environment felt interconnected, lik ... Read full article.