Then there was a patient at hospital, who had had a stroke and was aphasic, profoundly aphasic, and... who at first had been absolutely devastated, and horribly isolated, as people with aphasia can be. They may have all their intellectual powers, but they can’t… they don’t have language to express themselves with, or sometimes they can’t understand language, or both. Both were impaired with Pat, but one way and another, she found and was helped to find an extraordinary facility in gesture, in pointing, in understanding other people’s gesture, and also using a lexicon of words. She knew the individual meaning of words, or she got to know it, although she couldn’t get syntax, she couldn’t put a sentence together. But, Pat, although there was no, or very little neurological recovery, really had the most extraordinary personal recovery – became a very vivid figure. She had very good daughters, who took her out, and she went to art shows. She had herself been a... an entrepreneur of art, and had art galleries of her own before this happened, and she went to theatres and films, and she went swimming. This hemiplegic woman went swimming.
She was full of life, and I felt I couldn’t appreciate the fullness of her life sufficiently in a hospital room. What can you do in a hospital room? So one Saturday afternoon I arranged to go for a walk with her. She was in her wheelchair, one of her daughters was wheeling. We went down Allerton Avenue, which is a busy shopping avenue in the Bronx. It was obvious that Pat knew everyone, and... and they knew her, and that somehow she could have a pretty full communication with people, despite being profoundly aphasic. I found all of this extraordinary, and inspiring, and I wrote about Pat, and I became very fond of her too, and in fact, her photo is still up in the office, just above my desk, as... as some of Lilian Kallir’s CDs are with me, including one very special thing.
Once Lilian played a piece, which puzzled me. I said, 'It’s familiar, but... but it’s not familiar. You know, I don’t understand'. And she said, 'It’s simple'. She said, 'Last night I heard a Haydn quartet and I arranged it for piano in my head, overnight', and this was the piano transcription of it. She... as her ability to read music and look at printed music diminished, she got more and more heightening of her power to deal with music in her mind. So, I... but anyhow, to go back, I wrote about Pat as well. I think this may have been published a year or two later.
