After the Stroke by May Sarton Page B

me has gone. Shall I ever find it again?
    The counterpoint for this time of negation and nothingness has been the curious combination of an almost daily call from Pat Keen in Los Angeles with news of Nicholas Nickleby , which is having a great and deserved triumph there, and my call to Juliette Huxley. Juliette had the courage at eighty-nine to fly to Crete alone for two weeks. She came home to a heat wave in London! But the reviews of her splendid autobiography are good and she sounded very much on a wave of relief when I called her yesterday morning.
    The contrast between these two friends, so much alike in the struggle, and my snail-like existence is ridiculous. I want to be well.
    I note a typical hospital day which begins at:
7:00  A.M.
— 
male night nurse brings Metamucil and orange juice
7:30  A.M.
— 
brush teeth, nurse comes with pills and to take my temperature, etc.
8:00  A.M .
— 
breakfast
8:25  A.M.
— 
nurse to do a rhythm test of my heart
8:30  A.M .
— 
Edythe with the mail. Pat calls from L. A. while she is here, and when she leaves for a moment I let all the frustrations and grief out
8:45  A.M .
— 
a wheel chair to take me to Cardiology for an “echo” test
9:15  A.M.
— 
longing to get a snooze but it’s time for a shower and the nurse makes my bed while I’m having it
9:30–
 
 
10:30  A.M .
— 
read the mail and papers
11:30  A.M.
— 
Nancy comes
12 Noon
— 
lunch
12:30  P.M .
— 
Dr. Petrovich
1:00  P.M .
— 
maid to clean room, nurse for vital signs and pills
    Finally from 1:30 to 3:00 go fast asleep and have a vivid dream of Louise Bogan
3:00  P.M .
— 
Gail, nurse, comes in to take vital signs
4:00  P.M.
— 
Edythe with wonderful ice cream and we have a little walk

Tuesday, July 1
    Home again. I feel disoriented, without an identity. What a strange time this is, all told. Watering the flowers helped. I think one trouble is that I feel disassociated from the garden. Karen is doing such a good job, but it’s not my garden these days. I look and admire but am not connected.
    I cooked the salmon for our supper. Edythe will stay over this first night “at home.” Salmon, mayonnaise, boiled potatoes, peas, and hot fudge sauce on vanilla ice cream. A feast, as at the end I could not swallow the hospital food.

Wednesday, July 2
    Heavy persistent rain—and it is good to resume my old pattern and routine—to make a small start at least at living my real life again. Pierrot slept beside me, stretched out full length and purring very loudly, and that was a help last night. Now I look at the piles and piles of letters—and wonder—it’s an insoluble problem at this point, so maybe just pull one or two out by chance.
    I have nothing exhilarating to read at the moment. How impoverished a town York is without a single bookstore! There were two when I first came here. I’m feeling the emptiness of six months with almost no outside stimulation. I haven’t been in a shop or bookstore all that time, or out to dinner except once, and have seen only my entourage of Nancy, Edythe and Janice—and Pat the two weeks she was here, in which I was, I’m afraid, mostly in a kind of trance—just trying to keep things going in the house. I do look back with joy on our good long talks at tea time.
    Edith Kennedy, the most brilliant conversationalist I have known, used to talk about “the frame of reference.” With most of my friends here, dear as they are, the frame of reference is very small in scope. When it suddenly widens what a joy it is! And I think back to such a moment when I had supper in New York with Marguerite and Jacques Barzun and we were talking of the Mozart film—and he and I leapt together remembering Yvonne Printemps in Sacha Guitry’s delicious “Mozart” perhaps fifty years