But then, mostly unbidden, West began to voice a few words and phrases. Speech therapy in the hospital proved ineffective. A swallowing problem put West at risk of aspiration would he choke to death while trying to eat? His mood was black would he find a way to take his own life? And assuming he survived the immediate aftermath of the stroke, would he need to be institutionalized? His wife, meanwhile, was consumed by terrifying worries. West made little progress in the first few weeks. Both the diagnosis (“global aphasia”) and the prognosis were grim: “In the cruelest of ironies,” Ackerman writes, “for a man whose life revolved around words … could no longer process language in any form.” The only thing her husband could say was the nonsense word “mem,” repeated over and over in obvious frustration and anger. West was 74 and in the hospital with a kidney infection when he suffered the stroke. And his recovery - though its scope defied the odds and baffled medical experts - will never be complete.

Still, her husband’s journey was harrowing. In One Hundred Names for Love she deftly explains how the brain compensates for physical insults and injuries, adapting and growing and forging new pathways. Though Ackerman - an award-winning poet and naturalist - is best known as the author of A Natural History of the Senses (1990), she had also delved into the brain’s “marvel and mystery” for her 2004 book, An Alchemy of Mind. Make that she chronicles their epic struggle.Ī “word-besotted” couple, Ackerman and West met in the early 1970s at Penn State University, where she was a “flower-child undergraduate” and he a professor of literature 18 years her senior, with “yards of education … and a classy English accent.” Ackerman is at her most lyrical in One Hundred Names for Love when describing West’s gift for language: “Paul had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence,” she writes early on, “and he collected words like rare buttons.” Ackerman chronicles her husband’s epic struggle in her wise and luminous new book, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing.

A history of love by diane ackerman