Twilight Children: Three Voices No One Heard – Until Someone Listened. Torey Hayden
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fours while he was doing it. The tape showed me effortlessly adjusting my positioning to follow the child as he moved across the table and eventually back down into his chair again and during this whole time I’d never realized the boy had left his seat. My colleagues found this hysterical. And, needless to say, I now greatly appreciated the opportunity to see what I’d missed by viewing the session videos!
Consequently, on this occasion I was expecting to see clues in Drake’s behavior that I had overlooked during the session. With Helen’s added perspective, I hoped it would become clear to me why I’d failed to get him to talk and how I needed to adjust my approach for our next time together.
What I saw, however, was … nothing. Nothing at all different from what I’d perceived during the session itself. Drake came in eagerly. He engaged well with me, seemed attentive and interested in what we were doing, appeared motivated to try what I asked of him. And he did try. Again and again. What the videotape made clear was how hard he’d applied himself right from the beginning and then the heartbreaking decline of his mood when he did not achieve what I wanted. Watching it, I was relieved I’d stopped when I did.
I looked at Helen when the screen turned to snow.
“He can talk?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Because that’s my first impression. The boy can’t speak. You’re sure he speaks? He’s not deaf or anything?”
“No, he’s definitely not deaf. And yes, I’m sure he speaks. He talks at home to the mother. The big question mark in my mind remains bilingualism. He may be speaking only Italian to her,” I said.
“Have you tried speaking Italian to him?”
I grinned sheepishly. “If I knew Italian …”
“Yeah, well,” Helen conceded. Then she added, “But if it were bilingualism, wouldn’t he at least be able to repeat the words for you, even if he couldn’t use them himself? Or wouldn’t he try to use the Italian word or something?”
“Not if he’s electively mute.”
Helen sat back in her desk chair and slowly shook her head. “Then I’m no help. I didn’t see anything there you didn’t see.”
Turning off the video recorder and monitor, I returned to my desk and started to go through the telephone messages that had piled up. While most were the usual communiqués with other professionals over the various children I was involved with, one came from the hospital’s geriatrics department. Geriatrics? Curious, I lifted it out of the pile and dialed the number.
The phone was answered by a geriatric social worker named Joy Hansen. Ah, she said in a bright-sounding voice, what she wanted to talk to me about might be “a bit of a stretch” but she wondered if I’d give an opinion. My name had come to her via Dave Menotti, she said. She and Dave had been having coffee in the hospital cafeteria and she’d been discussing a case with him. He suggested perhaps I’d have some insight.
Intrigued, I asked for more information.
Joy had a patient named Gerhardine Sharple, who was currently in the stroke rehabilitation unit, housed in a nearby medical complex. Gerhardine, known as Gerda, was eighty-two. She had been in good health and living independently up until five weeks earlier, when she had had a massive stroke. After the initial stay in the hospital, she was then released to the rehabilitation unit and seemed to be making a reasonable recovery. However, there was an ongoing problem with her speech. Strokes often interfere with the language center in the brain, causing loss of communicative speech, which is known as stroke-induced aphasia. In Gerda’s case, she had recovered certain elements of speech almost immediately. In particular, she was capable of responding appropriately if she was asked simple, concrete questions. However, in spite of intensive speech therapy work, two problems remained. One, while she had demonstrated the ability to respond appropriately to questions, this did not mean she always complied with the request. And two, she produced no spontaneous speech whatsoever.
Joy said Gerda had been widowed many, many years before. She had been living alone in a small isolated farm. The house, a two-story clapboard of the sort commonly built at the turn of the twentieth century, stood amid ancient, half-dead cottonwoods and was surrounded by miles of sagebrush and little else. Although the emergency services had found things clean and tidy, the property was dilapidated in the way of the rural poor, and a haven for small animals. More than a dozen chickens ran happily in the yard, a goat was in the half-collapsed barn, and sixteen cats shared the house. Indeed, Joy said, Gerda seemed a stereotypically reclusive “cat lady” and, as a consequence, she had had little contact with neighboring farms.
She did have a family, but they were widely dispersed. Her daughter, married to a Spaniard, had been living in Spain for decades, and her son lived half a continent away in Detroit. Joy had contacted the son, whose name was Edward, and said he seemed distant and largely unconcerned. He had taken the news of his mother’s stroke with a disgruntled moan and characterized Gerda as “difficult.” He said he’d tried on two or three occasions to get her to see that the only real way he could take care of her in her old age was if she moved to Detroit where he and his family lived. Gerda had flatly refused. She was even unwilling to consider selling the house, he said, even though she could get a good price for that property, because it was a desirable location for rural development. He’d pointed that fact out to her several times. Why did she want to keep it? It was far more space than one person needed and starting to get very run-down because she couldn’t afford the upkeep and was simply past being able to do any of it herself. But his mother was difficult. She would never compromise to make it easier for anyone to help her. He was a self-made man, he explained. He’d pulled himself up from nothing. Got a good education, married into a good family, started a successful business, and really had made something of himself, but it hadn’t been easy. It was still hard work. He couldn’t just drop things to be at his mother’s beck and call.
The daughter was even less involved. When social workers had entered Gerda’s house after the stroke, they found photographs of the daughter, her Spanish husband, and their two children, but there was no way to tell when the photos had been taken. They couldn’t even find reference to the daughter’s name in the house. This was possibly not due to any purposeful removal but simply because Gerda did not seem to be a “keeper.” Her house was immaculately clean, in spite of all the cats, but also spartan. Joy had obtained the daughter’s name – Anna – from Edward, but this was clearly not a close family. He and his sister, who had returned to the States only twice since her marriage twenty-three years earlier, had no more contact than Christmas cards.
So that was the situation, Joy said. Social Services were now dealing with Gerda’s immediate future. She could only remain in the rehabilitation unit as long as it was apparent she was actually in the active stages of rehabilitation. For most stroke patients this lasted three to six weeks. In the doctors’ opinion, Gerda seemed to have made this initial recovery. Now decisions on her future placement had to be made, such as how much longer would she need full nursing care and would she be able to resume an independent life eventually? Could she care for herself in an isolated location such as her own home? At the moment, assisted care seemed more appropriate, or, indeed, full-time nursing home placement. Of course, all of this required money. A decision needed to be made, which would most likely entail selling her house to finance assisted-living arrangements.
Joy sighed. As the social worker, she had spent time trying to explore these various scenarios with Gerda, and Joy’s overall impression of the old woman was not one of a stroke victim so much as a very depressed individual. Depression, Joy said, is common among elderly patients who lose their independence and suddenly find themselves sleeping in strange beds, eating strange food, and having to live according to strangers’ rules. Joy was accustomed to dealing with that, but in this instance, it was grossly complicated by Gerda’s lack of speech. Joy had consulted the gerontologist supervising Gerda’s case and told him that she felt Gerda’s mutism might be largely psychological, due most likely to depression. The gerontologist put Gerda on Zoloft, which, if anything, had made Gerda even more subdued.
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