The Father Who Found His Voice

The House Outside Dayton

The house sits on four acres off a county road north of Dayton, a big square colonial that Maurice’s father built in the 1960s with more rooms than the family ever needed and a furnace that has never once kept the back hallway warm, no matter what the thermostat claims. I have lived there off and on for the better part of a year now, in the guest room down the hall from the room that used to be Maurice and Kelly’s and is now just Maurice’s, since Kelly moved to the room across the landing “so I don’t disturb his rest,” which is one way to describe not wanting to hear the oxygen machine cycle on and off all night.

I am thirty-seven years old. I have been married to Phil for twelve of those years, and for eleven of them I liked my father-in-law considerably more than I liked most of the rest of his family, myself included some days.

Maurice was the one who taught me to back a trailer into a tight space the first Thanksgiving I ever spent with this family, standing in the cold with his hands in his coat pockets, patient with me in a way nobody else at that table had bothered to be. He was the one who asked about my work, actual questions with actual follow-up, instead of the vague “and how’s the bookkeeping” Kelly tossed out once a year like she was checking a box. He remembered which of his grandchildren, my niece and nephew through Phil’s sister, liked strawberry and which liked chocolate, and he never once needed to be reminded.

In March, he had a stroke while he was out at the mailbox at the end of the driveway, and by the time Phil’s sister found him face down in the wet grass, he had been down for close to forty minutes.

The stroke took the right side of his body almost entirely. It took his ability to walk, to feed himself with his right hand, to control the right side of his face enough to keep from drooling when he was tired. And it took his speech, though not in the way most people assume when they hear the word “stroke.” The neurologist called it expressive aphasia, non-fluent type, likely Broca’s area involvement based on the scans. She explained it to us in the family conference room with more patience than I expected from someone that busy: Maurice’s understanding was very likely intact, maybe close to fully intact. What he had lost was the physical, mechanical ability to organize thought into speech and push it out through a mouth that no longer wanted to cooperate.

“Assume he understands you,” she said, looking around the room at all of us. “Talk to him, not about him. That matters more than people think.”

Kelly nodded along in that meeting like she was taking the instruction seriously. I want to be fair and say I believe she meant to, in the moment.