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Beautiful Lilly's

That's my beautiful Mom, Lillian. She loved her collection of cuddly teddy bears

Mom could have been an artist, a writer or both.  She kept journals from the time she was a young girl:  books full of descriptive details about a new bird she'd seen complete with drawings, or beautiful word paintings of sunrises and sunsets, snippets of fondly remembered events in her life, paragraphs describing uniquely-shaped clouds, rainbows in raindrops, sudden summer thunderstorms, and the first green sprouts of many springs.  Notes on 81 years of life, happy and sad.  She was enthralled with the beauty of nature, keenly aware of the world around her, in awe of it glorious  wonder.           In many ways, I am very much like both my parents:  I have an insatiably curious mind with a head always full of ideas.  Everyone in our family is a voracious reader, but the need and ability to express feelings and ideas in writing is something I inherited from Mom.           What would it be like not being able to express anything coherently, no way to make your wants understood?  What level of depression and frustration would have to be endured not being able to speak, or write, or communicate at all??  With frightful force it sruck me:  it would be like being a prisoner in your own body!!!  That realization terrified me for Mom.  I refused to let that continue for her.  I quit my job shortly after her stroke and moved back to be close to her.  I couldn't bear her heartbreaking sobs when I called her long distance.  She had always been there for me - I had to be there for her.           Having studied many foreign languages for years, even teaching conversational Russian and Spanish, I knew something about the process of language.  I had read fascinating books about how the brain processes it.  Why couldn't some of those methods work for Mom's relearning?           No need to work on vocabulary and input, that had not been affected.  What we needed to do was to rebuild the output channel somehow, but How?  Even highly trained speech therapists don't have many answers.  Their methods had worked only minimally despite her strenuous efforts, and their advice was to give up hope of further progress.  They didn't understand that "giving up hope" was not in my vocabulary because of the very person I wanted to help.           Begin somewhere, I decided; try something!  But, where?  What?  Sometimes it seemed that I was the only one who cared.  Others were content to leave her as she was.  The fruitless aggravation of her continued struggles with physical therapy depressed both of us.            MUSCLES!  Out of nowhere it dawned on me that she would never be able to speak clearly again unless she strengthened the muscles required for speech.            So, we devised an exercise game that everyone participated in:  family, nurses, aides, and therapists.  Make a broad, tight, toothy smile, teeth together, while making the sound "eeeeeee"; then, quickly push the lips forward into a pronounced, pouty pucker while making the "ooooooo" (rhymes with boo) sound.           These simple exercises did strengthen her throat and facial muscles, forcing her to smile too!  Smile, pucker, smile, pucker, smile, pucker; lightening her heart and mind and mine with every repetition.  Before long we were a couple of giggling girls making silly faces.  Soon, everyone that came into her room at the nursing home did this and she would mimic automatically, exercising without realizing it.  Little by little the clarity of her words improved.           Using the Russian adage, "repetition is the mother of learning", I made up nearly 300  3 x 5 cards with one or two words written on each.  The words were carefully chosen to develop lip, teeth, tongue, and throat sounds:  boo, book, big; do, don't, doodle; please, put, popcorn; Lillian, Les, Lanny, LeRoy, Linda, Larry (her name and those of all of her kids); Cupie, can't, cry; should, she, sugar, shoe, etc.  Repetitiously we'd go through the cards until she was too tired to do more.           Working on these words, her pronunciation kept improving as did her mental outlook.  She began talking more when people came to visit.  Every day the sounds came easier for her.  Sometimes I would deliberately put words in order to create silly sentences that unobtrusively checked her comprehension:  "fuzzy vampire eats popcorn." (Vampires don't eat popcorn, she'd exclaim!  "Lazy Linda likes licorice."  (Just like your Dad, she'd remember).           Through all of this we laughed as she struggled to say the words clearly.  The laughing was as important as the talking.  It made the process funny and fun instead of frustrating.  Some days she just didn't feel up to trying; other days she would force herself to try when most people wouldn't have bothered.  On we went at our own pace, excited with every small achievement.           We created a new vocabulary too!  She'd say funny-sounding words like "boozhey", "baldo", "calter", and "hinky".  Of course, I had no idea what it was that I was supposed to bring, or give, or understand, or do!  But, I knew if I had her keep trying to clarify the words, she would become grumpy and say with perfect clarity:  "Oh, just forget it!"  It fascinated me that she could speak with perfect clarity when she was upset.  I later learned from a doctor that is because anger triggers speech in a different, often undamaged portion, of the brain.  For this same reason, swear words come out clearly too.  Thankfully, Mom did not begin spewing swear words as some stroke patients who never did before suddenly start doing!  This same principle applies to any foreign languages a person may know; that too is in a separate "compartment" of the brain and can be unaffected by the stroke.           I have a silly sense of humor, a lighthearted approach to learning anything.  If something isn't fun, interesting and achievable, most of us lose interest in pursuing it willingly.  So, in kidding  Mom, I invented another game for us.  I'd say, "I'm not sure what a "boozhey" is, but if I was one, where would I be?  Am I getting warmer?  Is it in this room?  Is it on the table?  Is it in the closet?  Is it out in the yard?  Is it something you eat?  Give me a clue - try a different word for it.  Usually, she'd begin laughing, blurting out sounds until the right one popped out.  What fun!  We had solved another mystery!           Mom had made tremendous, miraculous progress, but she would still have too many days when her efforts to speak just produced gibberish and frustrated her to no end.  Well, God was still in this game and He had an ace up His sleeve!

Site last enhanced on: 1/13/02

At age 82, Mom was about to become a college student!!!