It's strange what you miss when you have a stroke. One moment, your mind is full of so many memories that you can’t recall them all. 

The next, poof, gone.

You must truly want to remember one to make it a priority and keep it top of mind. 

To recall, it is not because you can’t remember it but because it has to make its way through all the clutter to land in the front of the brain.

In your mind, you find memories that either no longer exist or are so jumbled up that they have no more form. 

You can’t find them because they are invisible, or even if you could find them, do they even mean what you think they mean? Or you find yourself too tired to want to see them or understand what they mean.

Hell, you find yourself wondering why you wanted to find that memory in the first place.

You’re trying to find a needle in a haystack with no flashlight, and you don’t even know where the haystack is or why you were looking for it in the first place. 

Wait, is there a needle?

Memories become a luxury.  

I spent a whole hour trying to remember a word, a memory of letters, to a dish that was right in front of me, a t-a-m-a-l-e. Something I’ve eaten a hundred times.

Tamale. 

I would ask my wife what the word was. Not once. Three or four times.

Tamale.

Repeat.

Tamale.

While I was eating it. The word “chicken” is written on the label.

Blank.

Finally, it would appear as a word that I could see as letters.

A memory of an experience.

Tamale.

It is not the first or last memory of a word or letters that has been a whisper or an elusive cloud to escape my catching in my brain.

The speech therapist explained it this way.

When I experienced a shock to a nerve pathway, the memory that was stored there was destroyed. 

Poof, gone.

Now, I had to rebuild a new pathway to a new letter or word to identify the memory of the item or experience in front of me.

I’m oversimplifying the process and probably getting it wrong but I know inside my brain what I mean to think and say. 

Tomorrow, Wednesday, March 8, will mark six weeks since a shard of plaque broke off from a clogged carotid artery in my neck and sent crashing into my brain setting off a cascading series of pathways evaporating…poof, they were gone. 

The good news, I’m told, is that it could have been worse. 

You can still talk. You can still walk. You can still use your arms and legs. Your face doesn’t droop.

I find it sometimes frustratingly difficult to recall a memory.

Next week, I begin speech therapy, which I’ve been told will include cognitive therapy.

In the meantime, I need to practice recall by reading aloud, typing words 

I can’t remember into a diagram of situations and context, and then trying to remember them.

Wish me luck with that.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that I also have to relearn how to type on my computer? 

Luckily, I have Grammarly.

Otherwise, it all seems like a jumble of words on the first pass.

But that’s a topic for another essay.