the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

xii Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
Preface
These are my stories losing language in a stroke, then brain trauma. I’m
a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, baby observer, bird watcher. My sense
of self survived using these skills to reflect on walking through a wilderness
without road signs. I found languages outside of verbal language that took
me to whole new worlds.
Oliver Sachs’ piece in The New Yorker, “Recalled to Life” is the
profound inspiration for this memoir. His piece took my breath away. He’s
a clinical neurologist telling an exquisite story of a woman who had totally
lost expressive speech, told of her capacity to make a life anyway. As aphasic
myself I marveled at his sensitivity to her life’s condition. His was a really
good story from the outside; I thought what if she could tell the story from the
inside of such loss to complement his? A few weeks later I thought, maybe I
can do this. So began the genesis of a five year journey to find language and
memory to tell such a story of the inner experience.
To speak at all was to locate the fewest words to express anything. I
wanted to keep this spare language to convey the unimaginable. Digging
deep, then deeper again, I rooted into memory to illuminate for those who
can’t imagine the loss of language. And I wanted to speak for those thousands
who have lost language and can’t ever tell you how it is.
Between 2005 and 2008 an estimated 7 million people in the US had a
stroke, nearly 800 thousand people -- on average every 40 seconds. 83% of
those survive—most with some handicapping condition, 664 thousand people.
The statistics for heart attacks are similar. Stroke, heart attack, cancer, and
upper respiratory disease are the top four.
These events bring a person to death or within a hair’s-breadth of
dying, as I was.
To survive these moments of physical-spiritual choice between life and
death is profound. It is also a choice point to make new life. From choosing
cutting edge surgery to coping with loss of language, to making art, there