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because Simon is comatose, the fact is that severed spinal cords do not heal. Simon will have no sensation or movement below his waist. So relieved am I to hear of the lack of a blood clot or high cervical fracture that I barely register this distressing diagnosis. It lands with a muffled thud deep in my consciousness with a strict injunction: new information to be dealt with later.
    “How fast,” Dr. King says, “how fast everything can change.”
    “Yes.” Had I known, really known this before? This is the central point of
The Year of Magical Thinking,
the exact point of departure for Joan Didion’s exploration of how a mind, her mind, attempts to catch up to that surreal and shattering moment.
    I have such a weird feeling. Like everything in my life is about to change. Totally change, like on a molecular level. Like my very atoms are shifting.
    I sit beside Simon and I swear I can feel, can almost see, his very atoms shifting.
    I sit beside him as long as I can, but when I am too dizzy and sick to remain upright, I return to the ICU waiting room. A young guy and girl are there (brother and sister? cousins?), and it is evident they are the night shift of a long family vigil. The young man is kind and helps me to adjust the temperamental recliner into a horizontal plane. I lie in a state of suspended animation and try to breathe. Tears come again, but when they do it is less like crying and more like vomiting, heaving and violent and beyond my control. I don’t want to wake the young man and woman, so I leave the darkened waiting room to huddle under the fluorescent lights of the nearby bathroom. Around three a.m., I return to Simon’s glass room with his Cormac McCarthy novel, and I read out loud so that he will hear my voice and know that he isn’t alone. I read carefully, wary. I know that McCarthy’s simple, clear language can lead a reader into sudden scenes of extreme violence, and I wish I had brought a different book for Simon. I do not want to stumble upon such a scene—no massacres of people or animals, no scalpings or vicious beatings. I scan each paragraph before proceeding, my voice a soft, undistinguished monotone that occasionally fades out when a stray thought overtakes me.
    A stray thought like
It’s been a hard winter in my head
.
    The phrase Simon spoke to his sister two days ago. At the very moment Simon uttered those words, I was opening up a link sent to us by Jay Johnson, the drummer for the Precious Littles. The link led me to a TED talk entitled
My Stroke of Insight,
by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. I watched it alone while Simon spoke with various members of his family, and was profoundly moved. As I made a pot of peppermint tea, I signaled him to wind up his conversation.
    “You’ve got to see this,” I said when he hung up the phone. I restarted the talk and we drank cups of tea while Bolte Taylor retold her amazing story of the stroke she suffered at age thirty-eight and of her subsequent recovery. On the screen, she held up an actual human brain, wrinkled and runneled, and trailing it, like a long hairless tail, the spinal cord. She discussed how the left and right hemispheres differ in what they think about and how they think about it: the left hemisphere, linear and methodical and constantly abuzz with the work of structuring our perceptions into a continuum of past, present, and future, versus the right hemisphere and its kinesthetic intelligence rooted in the sensory and energetic perceptions of the present moment. Simon, like me, was profoundly moved.
    Shock and lack of sleep fuel the sense that this recent memory is heavy with import, rich with the possibility of hidden insight into our current situation. How is it that two days before an artery ruptured in Simon’s left temporal lobe, we together, transported by Jill’s tale, imaginatively constructed the possible effects of blood flooding the left hemisphere of the brain? But this sense of significance, however