The Dictionary My Father Gave Me Before He Lost His Words
Aphasia took his sentences; the book he chose still speaks for him.
Four months before the stroke took his sentences, my father gave me his dictionary, and I nearly left it on the train. That is the part I have to say first, at confession speed, because everything that came after depends on how close I came to losing it. A 1968 Concise Oxford, navy cloth boards gone soft as felt, spine held on with surgical tape from the actual surgery where he worked as a porter for thirty years. He handed it over on my thirtieth birthday in the pub, no wrapping paper, just the book in a carrier bag from a shop that closed in 1994.
"You're the one who reads," he said, which in my family is a coronation.
I said thanks, Dad, and put it in the luggage rack... and a woman tapped my shoulder at my stop. I think about that woman more than she could possibly imagine.
My father was not a bookish man in any way you could photograph. He left school at fifteen. He read the racing pages and the backs of sauce bottles. But he did the crossword every single day of my childhood at the kitchen table, tea going cold, pencil behind his ear, and the dictionary sat beside him like a second wife. When I was small he would let me look up the answers and read them out, and he would nod along as if he were only confirming what he already knew. "Good word, that," he would say. "Good word."
The stroke came in October, on a Tuesday, while he was oiling the back gate. It left his legs alone and his memory alone and went straight for the one thing, the way lightning finds the tallest tree. Expressive aphasia, the consultant called it, drawing a diagram of his brain on a napkin because Dad kept glaring at the clipboard. The words were still in there, she said. The warehouse was intact. What the stroke had burned down was the loading bay.
He could understand everything. He could say almost nothing.
What he had left was "well, then" and, for reasons no one could explain, the complete lyrics of Roll Out the Barrel, because song lives in a different room of the brain than speech, and the fire had not spread that far. So my father, who had not been caught singing at any point in my recorded lifetime, could suddenly only be fluent in a drinking song from before he was born. The first time it happened we laughed until the nurse came in, and Dad laughed too, that new lopsided laugh, and then he cried... and then he said "well, then," which meant everything it needed to.
The frustration was the worst of it. You could watch him reach for a word and find the shelf empty.
He snapped a fork in half once trying to ask for salt.
I do not remember deciding to bring the dictionary to the hospital. I remember only that I did, on maybe the third visit, thinking he might like a familiar object. He took it from me and held it for a long moment... and then he did the thing that reorganized both of our lives.
He opened it, hunted with one finger down a column, and pointed.
Pelican. There were pelicans on the pond outside the stroke ward, absurd municipal birds someone had donated. He pointed at the word and then at the window and raised his eyebrows, and it was a whole sentence: have you seen these ridiculous things?
After that the book lived on his bedside table, and my father spoke in dictionary. He was slow, and it was hard, and it was speech. Sorry took him ninety seconds to find the day he knocked his tea over the physiotherapist. Home he found much faster, and pointed at daily, jaw set, until they let him go back to one. And one evening in December he searched a long time... longer than pelican, longer than home, while I pretended to watch the news, and then he tapped the page twice, hard, and I leaned over and read the word proud, and I had to go and stand in the corridor by the vending machine for a while, where the hospital smell of lemon disinfectant and old radiators has been permanently glued to that word ever since.
Here is the turn I did not see coming, and I lived it.
Some of the words in that dictionary had pencil dots beside them. I had noticed them my whole childhood without noticing, the way you never notice the wallpaper. Little graphite full stops in the margin, a few hundred of them across a thousand pages. I always assumed they were crossword answers he had looked up.
One night at his bedside, killing time while he slept, I looked closer... and next to each dot, in pencil so faint it was more pressure than mark, there was a date.
Engine: 3/9/61, the day, I learned later from his brother, he started at the railway works, fifteen years old. Yes: 14/6/69, my parents' wedding. Anaesthetic: a date in 1977 I could not place until my mother told me about the operation nobody discusses. Daughter: my sister's birthday. Son: mine. Redundant: 2/4/86, and beside it, the only place in the whole book, a second word dotted the same day: rally.
My father had kept a diary his entire adult life.
One word per event, chosen from the quarter million on offer, dated and hidden in plain sight in the book he consulted every single day at the kitchen table while his family assumed he was doing the crossword.
Language did not leave my father. It moved out of his mouth and went to live in a book he had already given away.
He gave it to me four months before the stroke. I have done the arithmetic on that a hundred ways. Coincidence, probably. But he was a man who felt weather coming in his knees, and I no longer entirely believe in coincidence where my father is concerned.
He lived three more years, mostly good ones. He pointed and sang and glared at clipboards. And he kept the diary going: he would gesture for a pencil, hunt down a column, dot a word, and print the date in his new shaky hand. Grandad, dotted twice, two dates, my sister's boys. The last dot in the book is from eleven days before the end, and the word is enough, and I promise you he meant it the warm way. He pointed at it and then at all of us around the bed, and he smiled his lopsided smile. Enough. As in plenty. As in full.
After the funeral I did what grief does to people like me: I tried to put it somewhere. I started with a prompt that started it all, one about inheritance, and wrote a bad poem about a dictionary, then a less bad one. I have been slowly learning the craft properly through lessons on writing, because it turns out choosing one exact word and letting it carry everything was my father's discipline before it was any poet's, and most of what I write keeps arriving at love by the back stairs, the way he would have insisted. Nothing soppy. Just facts, dated, in pencil.
The dictionary sits on my kitchen table now, beside the crossword I have started attempting in his honour and mostly failing.
There is a new dot in it, next to the word father, with a date in March three years ago, and another next to the word still, dotted this morning, because some words you have to look up your whole life to learn you already knew them.
Good word, that.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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