There are perhaps three reasons why I’m running the marathon for Breathing Space and Mind: (1) I suffer from seasonal affective disorder, a mild form of depression, which is alleviated by running, meditating and sitting in front of my light box. (2) I want to stay fit – there is a history of stroke and high blood pressure in my family and I want to do what I can to stay well. I’d love to run a marathon for the Stroke Association some time. (3) I know what it is like for someone I care about to suffer from depression. That encapsulates what gets me out in the park, like today – a beautiful early spring day, that’s how it felt, with the first pink blossom appearing and the sun shining, somewhat forlornly, through light clouds.
Here is a piece I wrote about ten years ago which touches on my father’s stroke and its consequences. I hope it is helpful in some way to post it here.
The Queen’s Own Fireworks
Dad used to be a goalkeeper and has just told me about rolling in the dust of the Ibadan College pitch as we sit watching a match on TV. In the next breath he spoke of the finger-numbing coldness of the fields in east London on Saturday mornings. As we relax after our Sunday roast, I imagine him lithe and young, a prowling lion defending his goalmouth, then springing to the air to catch the ball with his bare hands.
Of course I became a ‘keeper as well. At the rec across the road from our house in Stratford he would kick the ball so high that I’d wonder if it would ever come down. Picking me off the ground after failed attempts to catch it he’d lecture me on perseverance. But as we sit quietly watching Norwich defend we both know that I now do the picking up and the lecturing. He does the falling.
Half an hour ago as he was coming into the lounge he sneezed and fell over. The sneeze was his earthquake and travelled down a fault line in his body to send him rolling onto the carpet. I launched myself from the sofa and, touching his tracksuited arm, asked if he was OK. ‘Yes’ he answered sharply, but added that he wanted help to get up. After he’d turned onto his good side I put my arm around his waist to take his weight as he stood. He used his stick to walk to the chair where he sits intently watching the screen.
He follows Norwich now. They are the local team – just twenty-five miles down the road. Even mum listens to the matches on Radio Norfolk whilst she’s ironing, and I look for their results even though I moved from this village back to London as soon as I could.
They say that you’re accepted here after the fourth or fifth generation. Mum was accepted early, as a district nurse and a white woman. But dad was also welcomed, even though he was probably the first African to explore this vast, flat wilderness. Looking back I feel this was because he got involved in the thriving village church. The turning point was probably a garden party in the first summer. As he stood eating a chicken drumstick someone asked him what people ate in Nigeria. His single-word answer made the vicar laugh uncontrollably: ‘missionaries’.
Once a week, dad would go to the farm after work to get a chicken. That’s where he’d been on the night he had his stroke. He arrived home smelling of machine oil and sweat and put the chicken in the kitchen before going to wash and change for dinner. Mum found him ten minutes later slumped on the bathroom floor. By the time the ambulance arrived he was conscious but mum knew it had been what she termed ‘deep’.
He was in hospital for two months. The nurse said he’d have to get to know his leg again, so he called it ‘James’. As we walked away from him at the end of a visit, looking back at the cards that hung across his bed like lines of washing, he would tap his leg hopefully and shout ‘home James!’
I focus on the TV again as the commentator gets louder: Norwich are attacking. As the voice goes quiet and the ball flies past the goal dad asks for a toffee. I get up and reach behind the TV for the tin and hand him one, letting him take the green wrapper off himself.
He never used to have a sweet tooth. My friend S___ says that when she was on Prozac she was a ‘doughnut-a-day girl’. So now dad eats as much apple pie and custard as mum will make him and he even eats ice cream in the winter. He gives soft mints to anyone who’ll take one. I think of them as ‘bittersweets’.
The other day he walked past mum in the kitchen and opened the back door. When mum asked him where he was going he said quietly that he was going for a walk. She let him close the door before taking off her apron and following him. He walked around the corner of our bungalow and opened the shed door. He walked in and stood gently swaying amongst his tools, as if looking for inspiration. On seeing him start to turn, mum quickly went back into the kitchen and was just taking a sponge out of the oven when he came in and said ‘Pamela, where is my machete?’ Another time he walked to the shed and came back saying that he thought there had been a wooden beam along the inside of the roof, where we’d hung onions. Mum bit her bottom lip, taking the blood from it, saying ‘no, there is no beam.’ She took the tow rope from the car that evening and hid it.
He has mini-strokes. They cascade like the Queen’s own fireworks through his brain. When he awakes he sees me when I’m not there and finds it even harder to walk. I want to talk to him about his family, about his mother who died in Warri three months ago. But I can’t find my voice. I continue to listen though, and pick up snippets of his life. And I continue to write about him. On the screen the meagre crowd cheers. Norwich have scored.
