Happy Birthday, Martha

Today is the birthday of a friend from my days teaching in Georgia. Martha and I share a love of mysteries and detective fiction. Sadly, a few years ago she had a stroke due to uncontrolled diabetes (yes, even smart people can go undiagnosed). She has lost much of her manual dexterity, but another, even more profound change, has occurred in her personality.

Martha is a super-intelligent, extremely well-educated woman. She has more college degrees than anyone else I know. When we saw each other on a regular basis back in Georgia (1989-1993), I always knew that her comments and insights would be acerbic, caustic, but funny. She cut no one any slack. When the wretched department chair (a man who had been especially cruel to Martha) developed testicular cancer, she celebrated the poetic irony. Then our lives took us in different directions. When I went to Missouri, Martha wrote one of my letters of recommendation for my application to the Ph.D. program. She herself wound up in Nashville, Tennessee, where a number of her friends live. We kept in touch for a long time via email (still the way we keep in touch), then she dropped off the radar for a long time.

Then one day I got a letter from her. Instead of her usual eloquent prose, it was as if it had been written by a first grader. She explained her stroke, her coma, and her eventual recovery. It has been only a partial recovery. She has spent much of the time since the stroke in rehab and assisted-living facilities. She tried to return to work, but I don't think it worked. Her friends take her to movies and to other functions, but I think most of the time, she lives in a care facility.

The big change, perhaps due to her difficulty with communicating, is that she is kinder, nicer, less caustic, more sentimental. Don't get me wrong--she has lost none of her innate intelligence in that she still has the memory abilities of a computer. But now that she has faced one of the worst fates that a really intelligent, educated person can imagine, she is less harsh. She is gentler. Maybe age itself would have effected this change, but I doubt it.

I haven't been able to visit her, and I think that's what she prefers. When we communicate, we don't talk or write of her medical condition. We stick to talk of books, movies, tv shows, and sometimes politics. Because I knew her "back when," she can for a short while, perhaps, be that woman she used to be. Just a more compassionate version.