The reverse of this tiny sepia-toned photograph reads “Paul Godfrey Easter 1949 Stewartstown, PA.” It was originally written in pencil but was later partially fleshed out in ink. The handwriting I immediately recognize as that of Mary Godfrey, my paternal grandmother. I’ve no recollection of how I came into possession of this photograph, but after moving to France it fell out of a book as I was unboxing and shelving stuff we’d had shipped from the USA. It’s possible Paul himself sent it. He used to mail me strange messages including Garfield or Far Side clippings from the newspaper and hand-scrawled notes on old receipts. Once he sent me a Polaroid of a woman he was then involved with–she was nude and far younger than he. He’d scrawled “daily vitamin pill” on the photo. I don’t know the name of the young woman but I heard later that she took Paul’s ATM card and emptied his bank account. A bit later Paul became unhoused.
On June 1st at 8:45 pm Paul Godfrey died in hospice care in Gettysburg PA, the town where I was born in 1969. He’d had a stroke a few weeks earlier which left him a bit weak on the left side. He was institutionalized to undergo rehab but refused to participate, refused food and water, and went into a rapid decline. Eventually staff gave up trying to engage him and instead medicated him against the pain of starvation. He was 80.
Paul Benjamin Godfrey was my biological father. Your inclination might be to offer sympathy in this circumstance; that’s kind and considerate but wholly unnecessary. We weren’t close, and were in fact estranged from one another for decades. I think we spoke a half-dozen times in 35 years. My younger sister heroically assisted him his last few years and had visited him in hospice without getting much response. I, on the other hand, had almost entirely excised him from my life quite some time ago. Due to the staid dictum don’t speak ill of the dead, I’ll refrain from cataloging the reasons here. I’ll simply state that my mother gathered our belongings into a few trash bags and left his house after calling the police one night in the 1970s, my sister and I in tow. She wanted the police there as she fled in case Paul showed up. He worked night shift and we escaped to shelter in a good samaritan’s house for a couple weeks before moving into the home of my maternal grandparents. Later, there was a brief attempt at reconciliation which failed and divorce procedings were engaged. I was 7 years old, my sister 5.
My sister asked if I’d write an obituary. I could barely come up with 500 words. It says something that a man of 56 years could know so little about his father’s life that minimal details were tough to scrape together into a brief narrative. But such was our relationship, or lack of.
There will come a time when I have more to write about Paul Godfrey. For now, however I’ll remain silent and allow that photo from 1949 to be my memory of him. It was taken 20 years before my birth, and it’s a very cute and charming photo of a presumably loveable little chap. May the conditions and torments which caused that young child to become the man I knew be laid to rest.
I had this damn spigot attached to my arm for 8 days
I’d never spent the night in a hospital before. I’d had two surgeries over the years, but in each case was ejected callously onto the street after the anaesthetic wore off. This was to be a new experience.
Before I was shuttled upstairs from the ER I was told that the MRI was normal. No sign of stroke, bleeding, or clots in the brain. The EKG was normal and healthy. All my vitals were strong, and were in fact quite good for a man of a certain age.
And yet I was being kept for observation. I asked why this was so if the tests were negative, and was told it was because the doctors believed I might have clots in the veins of my neck.
My wife was informed she could accompany me, and then was told she could not when we got to the fifth floor. My roommate was asleep and they did not want him disturbed, so she was told to go home as it was after 11pm. She did manage to sneak in and make sure I had my phone before she left me there in the dark.
Needless to say I passed a pretty miserable night. I was put on an IV of anticoagulant meds. I was disturbed every two hours by nurses who pricked my fingers for blood sugar tests, who changed my IV bag, who cheerfully asked “are you sleeping well?” before jabbing a syringe into my thigh or giving me a paper cup of pills. I was routinely subjected to blood pressure, temperature, and pulse checks.
a few meals featured wrapped cheese and yogurt. little else was edible.
On top of all this my roommate was an old codger whose breathing was reminiscent of Regan Macneil sorely beset by Pazuzu. Any time I managed to drift off he would explode in a coughing fit, after which he would get out of bed, turn on all the overhead fluorescents, and shuffle around the room banging into things.
At 5am the nurses entered cheerfully chirping good morning and asking if I’d had a good sleep, to which I could only respond with sarcastic laughter. Again with the poking and prodding and the taking of blood vials. “I’m sorry to inform you” the older and more sour nurse said in French, “but you are restricted to bed rest and must remain prone until further notice. You might break off a clot and cause it to travel to brain, head, or heart. This would not be good.” She placed a urinal within reach and left.
So my first stay in hospital was to be the full experience indeed!
Over the next 5 days of strict bed rest I was subjected to all the requisite indignities. The staff were extremely polite and empathetic as they stabbed my fingertips and blasted a fat injection needle into my thigh once day. When I asked about the injection I was told it was another anticoagulant, as were the powder and pills I received with each meal. I was bathed in the bed and changed, and my linens were swapped out by rolling me to one side and then another. From the bed I could see only the sky and the tops of a few trees.
I think 18 vials of blood were drawn over my stay. It got to the point where the nurse could not find a vein which had not been pierced and so she told me with profound pity that she had to reuse a hole and it would hurt a lot. “Je vous pique” was the standard greeting after a while.
I met the attending physician around noon on my first day. His French was accented and I pegged him as North African, which proved true. He asked what I was doing there and I told him my story and what the ER doctors had said. He shook his head, and replied in French “I don’t think you have clots at all. I think you had a brief episode as a result perhaps of a sudden drop in blood sugar, or maybe some sort of migraine. By the way you are in gerontology in the gastro wing because there are no beds upstairs in neurology available, but the neurologist is in charge of you and checking your test results.” He informed me I had further tests coming, and was not scheduled for discharge today or tomorrow.
My roommate was an affable old guy who’d had a stroke and collapsed on the floor of his kitchen. He was a lifelong bachelor and had come to after several hours and called the ambulance. He’d been in the joint 6 days but was scheduled to leave on Monday. We chatted a bit and he was interested to learn that I was American and living in Treignac, as he lived in Madranges a few km away. His French was a bit difficult to follow and it turned out he was Portuguese but had lived in the Correze since 1987. He had a portable radio and liked to blast it all day. His favorite program was a contest during which the announcer would play animal sounds. People would call in to guess the animal. “Nope, sorry, it’s not a dove, it’s a pigeon, you lose!” or “No this is not a pig, it’s a wild boar, better luck next time.”
On day 5 in the hospital I was still on bed rest. My muscles had atrophied and I was having spasms in my back from lying prone so long. I’d sat up to relieve the pain only to be clapped at and scolded by a nurse. When we’d left for the ER I’d brought a magazine in case we’d be there a while, and had read the entire thing the first morning. My wife brought me my tablet and several books to keep me busy, and while laid up I read even more than the typical daily allowance. My roommate had checked out and I’d actually had a couple nights of reasonable sleep. I’d made friends with most of the nurses and staff, and was joking a lot with the doctor who really regretted my situation. He wanted to release me but the neurologist was adamant that I should stay.
I was adjusting to the “food” served in hospital (the most edible thing all week was pureed peas with coriander). On Day 5 two interns arrived and rolled me out and up the elevator to another level. I was given an ultrasound of the neck to check for clots. After I was all lubed up and scanned the tech showed me my veins and arteries and declared me perfectly clear and healthy. “No signs of clots or even of plaque. You have the neck of a 20-year old, with nice flexible vertebrae.” So the anti-coagulants and mandatory bed rest were completely unnecessary! I was allowed to not only sit up, but to get out of bed and move around. I celebrated my new limited freedom by walking slowly and stiffly down the corridor from my room to the Christmas tree at the end of the hall and back. Then I had a sort of potato salad with vienna sausages mixed in for dinner.
Sitting up, and looking out the window–an unimaginable luxury
Friends visited and brought more books. I called my Mom and told her what was up and why I’d not told her days earlier. On day 6 I was walked downstairs by the doctor to another lab for an electroencephalogram. They attached a few dozen electrodes to my scalp and chest and then put on Pink Floyd and made me close my eyes. I had to breathe in different patterns and move my eyes in certain ways as they took readings. For ten minutes they flashed bright light patterns into my closed eyelids. Geometric patterns danced around my skull. I visited the Dark Side of the Moon and returned unscathed.
After the ECG I asked the doctor if I could go home. He gave me a wry smile and patted my shoulder. “The neurologist wants to do some more subtle cardiac assessments first.”
Day 7 and Day 8 were the same old same old, except that I was permitted to use the toilet and walk around on my own. Day 8 was the Friday before Xmas and I was starting to wonder if I’d be in hospital over the holidays. A nurse woke me at 5 am to drain another round of blood vials for further testing. They were looking at causes like epilepsy, migraine, tick-borne illness, MS, diabetes, but had found nothing. I had not been roofied at the bar. My blood pressure and pulse were healthy, my cholesterol was a bit high–but there was no indication as to what had caused my incident.
Around 9 am on Day 8 the doctor arrived and teased me by asking if I was prepared for another week in the hospital. I told him I would throttle the neurologist and he laughed and said many had promised to do so, it was why he stayed upstairs. My ECG results were completely normal, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The neurologist had finally cleared me to go. They wanted me to consult with a cardiac specialist and a neurologist over the next few months but they’d found nothing to explain what had happened to me. French hospitals are the exact opposite of American hospitals, it turns out. Back home if they find nothing wrong after a superficial exam, they put your ass out on the street; over here they will search thoroughly and do every possible test to make sure there is no problem before sending you home.
I bathed myself, my IV line was removed, I changed into street clothes. I felt like a new man, reborn and full of strength and hope. After 8 days and nights of dismay and fear and uncertainty I was bursting with optimism. I took a last look at my prison cell, and even though it was cold and rainy and my wife would not be there to fetch me for another hour, I went outside and walked around the parking lot gleefully.
I’ve logged onto my national health web account and seen all of my test results. I have a lot of health data indicating that there is nothing wrong with me. As for the strange incident at the cafe last week, it remains a mystery. I did learn a lot of new French vocabulary in hospital, at the least!
On Friday December 15th I was riding high. We’d been to the Prefecture in Tulle the day before in order to retrieve our renewed visas–applying was a somewhat arduous process which took almost six months, and we were quite pleased to find our renewal was not only for one year, but for four.
We’d had a successful year with our gite rental business, and had also expanded to host several successful events including multiple concerts and a huge Christmas Festival. We were considering maybe getting away for a week to explore a new part of Europe to celebrate. All in all, our move to France appeared to be going quite well 1.5 years in.
We went to the Treignac Christmas market and ran into friends outside the Salle de Fete, and after a quick tour of the vendors decided to go to Cafe du Commerce for a quick coffee. As we made our loop around the market I’d had a strange kaleidescopic prism worm its way across the top of my left eye, after which I felt a bit out of sorts–a tad tired and grumpy. I chalked it up to being spent after so many days in a row of work and stress, and continued on my way.
At the Cafe we had a wide-ranging conversation about spirituality and shamanism and drugs and Jesuits and life on an Indian ashram. I’d continued to feel a bit out of sorts and then realized that I was having trouble forming words. I finished my point speaking to the Irishman to my left and remember thinking “well, just stop talking. Be polite and nod and smile, but take a rest from speaking.” I’d only had a coffee to drink, but felt as though I were intoxicated. I could see everyone and was able to follow the social niceties, nodding appropriately, smiling, laughing a few times, but I realized that the conversation had grown beyond my capacities to follow. My awareness, my conscient core, was shrinking rapidly. Everything grew dim, and the people around me were all faceless. I could only recognize their hair, it was too much to decode their faces. A friend across the table was speaking to me directly and I knew I was being addressed but had no idea what he was saying. He handed me his phone to show me something, I took it and mimed looking at it, and nodded, but could see nothing on the screen. I felt like I was becoming smaller and smaller, and yet my main concern was an adamant focus on not alarming anyone or causing some sort of scene.
I took out my own phone to occupy myself and found that I couldn’t read or understand its function. I leaned over to my wife and said something about “all these messages, I don’t understand them, who is messaging me” but I couldn’t hear what she was saying in reply and did not even know for sure if I’d spoken.
Another friend arrived and joined our group. I reached over and shook his hand and smiled but had no idea who he was. At this point I realized there was a dog at the table but I had no idea how it had got there, and then looking around I discovered that I didn’t know anyone’s names. I sat back down and my wife was saying something and clutching my arm and suddenly I snapped back to myself. She was saying “I’m taking you to the emergency room, you’ve had a stroke!”
My full awareness returned so suddenly and all at once that I responded indignantly “what are you talking about, I’m fine!” But as I stood to pay our bill I staggered a bit, and then could not summon the basic French to interact with the bartender. I managed to pay and walk out and the entire time my wife was hammering me about going to the Emergency Room, but I felt completely fine. I drove us home, where she kept telling me names of people I didn’t recognize at the bar, and I kept saying that either I didn’t know such a person or that they hadn’t been there. She got very frustrated with me and called our German friend who drove over to assess me himself. After he left thinking I was OK I drove us back to the friend’s house where we were staying while we babysat their hound dog. I fed the dog, let him out, and played with him, and then the entire episode came back to me. The confusion, the sense of shrinking awareness, the inability to follow or participate in a conversation, not recognizing familiar people.
I agreed to go to the ER in Tulle, and after explaining in French what had happened, was quickly taken in the back, given an EKG and an MRI and told that the results were normal/negative. I thought “Ok, no stroke, no aneurysm, I’ll be on my way!” But no, they took me upstairs, admitted me and kept me 8 days in the hospital.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 