The Familiar Road

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.