When I was in high-school, I had a best friend I called Sunshine. She was sweet and quirky and scrawny and her dad was abusive and horrible. He was like some cartoon monster -- diabolical and selfish, paranoid and mean -- he beat her up, called her a whore, read all her journals and letters, crammed all her stuff in garbage bags and told her she had to leave, then changed his mind and told her she could never leave, etc, etc.
He was awful.
Then he had a stroke.
After the stroke he became this big sweet teddy bear. He was a little dopey, he was kind, he was friendly and warm. He was like a completely different person. Or perhaps the stroke knocked out one part of him so that another part could shine through. Maybe the teddy bear had been there all along, just smothered all his life by the big horrible monster. Who knows.
Either way, he was partly broken and it worked out pretty well for everybody, including him.
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2 comments:
Wow. That's amazing. I wish I could remember more often that the things I dislike about people may well be completely physical and beyond their control. (Even if they're not physical, they might well be beyond their control, but that's an even harder thing to bear in mind :->)
i am really glad you're blogging again. :)
this post is incredibly relevant for me, because my dad has had multiple strokes (i believe, over 30) and as a result his personality has changed a fair amount. i would say, he is still mostly the guy i grew up with, but he does get teddy bear-ish more quickly than he used to. so i think there is something to that theory
no big surprise that the biggest change is his memory capacity, and that has affected our family in a variety of ways, mostly for the worse. to dale's point, there are a lot of difficult personality traits that have been exacerbated by these strokes, so there is a physical element to them...but that does not keep them from being really friggin annoying. it's tricky.
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