Different Strokes

May 31, 2005

Once again I’ve pulled my disappearing act, this time for less than a week in hospital.

Today's column is "Different Strokes" -- Read Joe's columns the day he writes them.

I enjoy the pampering, but I confess I’m getting a little tired of Jell-O.

I was still recovering from a recent operation on my foot when my son Mike noticed that my speech was slurred and my facial muscles were sagging on one side. I was also finding it hard to concentrate and even to type. Mike suspected I’d had a mild stroke and called my doctor.

Mike remembered that both my parents had died of strokes, and he also knew something he wasn’t telling me. Anyway, my doctor examined me and sent me straight to the hospital, where tests confirmed that I’d indeed had a stroke.

Then came the shocker. I got a phone call from my older son, Kent, 38, who lives in Ohio. He sounded fine, but he told me that he’d also had a stroke in early May. And his was more severe than mine, paralyzing his left side. He walks with a cane now, but he’s expected to make a full recovery.

My poor, dear boy! You can accept the signs of your own mortality, but when your children are afflicted, there are no words for what you feel. Kent is the oldest of my four, and maybe the most beloved among those who know him. I’ve always been especially proud of him; I’ve often thought he grew up before I did. Relatives, friends, and fellow workers are eager to help him now, so I don’t have to worry that he’ll be alone, though I can’t visit him yet myself. Still, until now he has always been self-sufficient, and it’s painful to know that today he depends on others for so many things he has always done independently. Then again, I tearfully remembered the days when he was a little boy who depended on me.

Mike and the girls, Vanessa and Chris, had known about Kent’s stroke for a couple of weeks, but decided to keep the bad news from me for the time being as I recuperated from my surgery. But knowing what he knew, Mike put two and two together when he saw my symptoms. My children have become my protectors. King Lear should have been so lucky.

[Breaker quote for Different Strokes: Heredity strikes again.]

[Breaker quote for Different Strokes: Heredity strikes again.]

I’ve also learned a bit of my family’s medical history. I never met my mother’s father, who died a few years before I was born. He was only 41. Now I’m told he was killed by a stroke. Come to think of it, his wife, my grandmother, suffered a terrible stroke many years later.

Well, now I know better what to look for. A doctor in the hospital suggested that my and my family’s blood clots too quickly and needs to be thinned a bit. Point taken. I’ve reached the age where you eat your own weight in pills, hoping they are low in calories and carbs.

I forget who invented heredity, but I often wish he hadn’t. It would have been wiser to leave these things alone and just let nature take its course — or, as one might say, let nature take its corpse. Now we have to worry about inheriting genes and things from our parents and then passing them on to our kids to boot.

This complicates our natural pride and joy in our offspring. Your child gets the sniffles and you ask yourself guiltily, “What have I done?” You can’t assume he caught it from a classmate; he may have gotten it from you! You and your damned genes. To the ancient childhood complaint “I didn’t ask to be born” is now added the new twist, “And I certainly didn’t request your lousy bloodlines!”

So far my four have shunned such recrimination, responding to all our common ailments with commendable esprit de corps — or, if you like, esprit de corpse. They seem to take the old-fashioned view that we’re all in this together, and whatever Dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

They do grow up so fast! I was reminded of this again last fall when a policeman at my door woke me before dawn to tell me I faced arrest; but to my great relief I was able to convince him that he was confusing me with my grandson Joe, who is named after me. Apparently Joe had given the cops my address instead of his own. Quick thinking, kid! He got that from me. Heredity isn’t all bad.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2005 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
Internet publications without express permission
of Griffin Internet Syndicate
small Griffin logo

Send this article to a friend.

Archive Table of Contents

Current Column

Return to the SOBRAN’S home page.