Free One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir by Diane Ackerman

hospital with multiple injuries and disabilities, including loss of high-level brain function. All the so-called executive functions were permanently impaired, and executives are a busy tribe—overseeing the workers and machinery, setting goals, brokering deals, assigning duties, doling out resources, liaising with others. Never again would he find it easy to learn or remember. His attentive parents arrived every day, and he seemed elated to see them, but the tragedy on their faces spiraled right into me. Is this the desert of hope I have in store for me? Paul no longer able to learn and grow? What if he can’t even remember what I say from day to day, or what he’s already said? What a wasteland that would be. Silently saying the word wasteland, my memory bounced into action and tagged T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem of disillusionment which I first read in college when I was this boy’s age. He probably did, too. But what would he remember of anything he’d learned? Or hoped to learn? Which is crueler, an old man’s lost memories of a life lived, or a young man’s lost memories of the life he meant to live?
    Another of Paul’s companions was a slim woman in her sixties, newly retired, admitted for routine surgery, after which a large clot broke loose, sparking a massive stroke. She was the unlikely statistic, the 1 in about 10,000 who had suffered stroke as a complication of a simple procedure. Unable to walk, she was confined to a wheelchair, body atrophying but mind and speech intact. She told me she had been planning a tour to the national parks with her husband, whom I saw visiting her every day, always wearing a checked long-sleeved shirt and looking perpetually adrift. I imagined the psychic whiplash they felt from this sudden change in life’s trajectory. She’d gone from self-reliance to hospital idleness; and he found himself looking after a completely dependent wife. Was this what awaited me?
    The last complement to the ward was a deeply tanned man in his mid-seventies, who had been admitted to the hospital with a kidney stone obstructing the right ureter and a somewhat routine urinary tract infection, but suffered a stroke with aphasia while at the hospital. A pacemaker aided his irregular heart. His wife, a woman in her mid-fifties with a pile of black hair, usually arrived wearing T-shirt dresses, leggings, and tennis shoes, stayed with him all day, and sometimes slept in an armchair at his bedside. Paul was this last among a propinquity of souls, and I the wife who always looked so distraught and exhausted.
    WHEN I ARRIVED one morning, Paul sat scowling and grumbled grouchily: “Mem, mem, mem!!” He held up five fingers twice, as if he were pushing a palm-sized button, and gestured toward the nurses’ station.
    “Lots of nurses have been in . . . and they’re not being nice to you?”
    He nodded curtly with a stormy black look.
    Swinging into gear, I started going down a mental checklist of things they could have forgotten:
    “Are they forgetting your medication?”
    No response.
    He dropped back into his bed, his eyes full of contempt.
    “Are they forgetting your meals?”
    No response. I rested my hand on his arm only to have him brush it away.
    “Are they not helping you to the bathroom?” I tried, bending to keep eye contact as he turned away from me yet again, revealing the back of his head—unwashed, matted fleece. Your hair is like a flock of goats , I thought.
    Finally, it dawned on me to ask: “Are they treating you like you’re a child?”
    He knotted his face angrily and blurted out a long smudge of syllables “Rhey wickyderm stumpf yagtarggritty andortmfgvpfl!!!!!” and I sensed he was saying something like, I’m a grown man—I know how to do this stuff! And they’re treating me like I don’t know how to stand up!
    He pointed to the whiteboard which showed his schedule for the day—a busy one full of speech and physical therapy—and made one of those universal