On Valentine's day morning I went out for my run. I passed a neighbour who is a trauma surgeon on his way back from (presumably) an overnight call. "Hello!" I called and he smiled and gave me a high-five as he passed me on his bike, which I took to mean that whoever it was he operated on stayed alive.
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That run was perhaps not a great idea, because later on that day I began to feel weak, tired, and was sneezing constantly. So I took the next two days off work and in bed (and cycled through a total of three toilet rolls blowing my nose - sorry trees) and decided to read through some of my parents old letters.
A few years after Mum and Dad started dating, Dad moved back to Singapore while Mum stayed in London (with a short stint in Spain). They flew to see each other on a Russian plane service called Aeroflot which was notoriously unreliable but worked for their budget, but between visits they would write (almost weekly, it seems) and send each other cassette tapes of their voices which I like to think of as the ancestor to the Whatsapp voice messages I send to friends in Britain. Almost all of the letters I have are from Dad to Mum rather than the other way around, and reading them have shown me a different side of him. Growing up, Dad was always loving but usually expressed that in acts of service rather than words. After his stroke, when he began to get his words back, "I love you" has been a hard one to get hime to say. Sometimes I sit by his bed and our conversation goes like this:
M: "I love you, Dad."
D: "Thank you."
M: "I love you, Dad."
D: "...Thank you."
M "I love you, Dad."
D: "Love you."
In his letters, however, he expresses his love for Mum earnestly and freely. They have pet names! He also writes passionately about politics (which is something that didn't really change), with paragraphs about the dangers of communism.
Reading that and realising that was part of Dad that I never got to experience has been helpful and healing as I continue to think of how Dad behaves post-stroke and how there are parts of him that used-to-be and might-not-be. He changes, like all of us. The stroke caused a very sudden and extreme change but just because he is changed doesn't mean he is not him.
My family often talks of "pre-stroke Dad" and "post-stroke Dad" almost as if they are two entirely different people and to be honest, that is how it felt and does sometimes still feel: like my Dad died when he had his stroke and was replaced by himself-but-not. I still miss the Dad I knew, because there are things you learn to love and love involves growing deep roots of habit and familiarity. These are not things that heal easily when they are so suddenly cut off.
I believe though, that in the way my Mum was in love with this letter-writing man, and continued a complicated but love-based relationship with him even when he no longer wrote letters and sometimes the language they spoke seemed to be entirely at cross-ideals, so love grows and changes. If you ask me if I love my Dad, of course I'd say yes (and I remind him of it often). It is a different love than we had, in part due to a shift in the balance of power and a new dynamic of care, but it is still love and familiarity is budding again.
