They say that repeated use strengthens the neural pathways
governing our thoughts, words and movements.
It must be the same with well-travelled roads.
One journey has been constant throughout my life. Every school
holiday, every Christmas and Easter, we have driven, often in the dark, down the
lonesome country lanes that lead to my grandmother’s farm in West Wales.
The farm has changed over that time. Though she rents the
farmland out now, I can just about remember feeding newborn lambs and playing
with Charlie the sheepdog. As for the
journey itself, however, that never seemed to change. It’s true I’ve ditched my
walkman But we have always travelled the same roads, passing though the same,
unaging villages until we reached the
emblem of the wolf that has guarded the farm for decades.
Even when we moved to Swansea and I gained a new home, a new
church, a new school and new friends, we ended up at the same destination, passing
the same landmarks, albeit by a shorter route.
Except for one Sunday when the destination did change. I was
still in bed when we had the phone call. My mother pried open the door and told
me that her mother had had another stroke. At the time, I thought that meant
another mini-stroke, a so-called warning shot, not a full-blown, life-changing
stroke.
After the service that morning, my father and I made that
same journey once again. We talked about his father and his illness as we
travelled westward. I have just one memory of my grandfather. We were going
somewhere. I think it might have been a hospital appointment. My grandmother
was shouting at him, telling him to ‘put his boots on’. For some reason, the fact
that she said ‘boots’ instead of ‘shoes’ sticks in my mind. Not that it was her choice of words left him
confused and unable to answer. For years, I assumed he was deaf. When I was
older, I realised that dementia had made him deaf not to words, but to meaning
itself.
And so we found ourselves in a stroke ward. It’s difficult
to forget the inhuman sound of a human struggling to speak. One patient who
tried every now and then to shout and scream sounded as if he was being strangled.
My grandmother, too, tried to force out some words when we saw her. She seemed to
choke, and then I think she cried. When it was time to leave, I told that I was
sorry to see her like this and that I would pray for her. She raised her right
hand, the one side of her body she could still control, and waved us goodbye.
That voiceless gesture, somehow full of her personality, reminded me that her
body undeniably belonged to her.
I am still here.
Later, after we had left, she was given a paper and pen. This is the end, she
wrote.
She was wrong, of course.
Over the months that followed, we made that old journey again
and again, this time, though, with a different destination. They say that our
brains can find new ways of navigating damaged neural networks. With time, my
grandmother learned to bypass her body’s stroke-broken nerves. Unslurred speech
replaced the silence. Eventually, we could drive past the hospital, pulling up
instead at the farm.
But there was something different about the route. I
realised that we no longer drove through the villages that had once been fixed
markers along the journey. It had been months since I had been through Roberston Wathen, Llanddewi Velfrey and Slebech. During my grandmother’s time in
hospital, they had built a new road bypassing that quaint mishmash of
Anglo-Celtic and Viking names.
And so the journey was, like the destination itself, slightly
different to before.
