Nancy Huggett is a writer, caregiver and settler descendant who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
I am fascinated, if somewhat ignorant, about the brain. But since my daughter’s brain surgery and stroke, which I describe in “We Name Our Snakes” (Intima, Spring 2022), I find myself asking all sorts of questions that had never occurred to me before. Who are we? Are we immutable? Are the parts of ourselves built in relationship and in relation to our dreams and passions a steady current that runs through our lives? What if that current is deflected or blocked? Who has stories to tell about this?
With regard to the brain, stories, poetry and art illuminate the unique quirky workings and misfirings that fail to follow what textbooks and MRIs might profess or predict. Cassia Tremblay’s poem “In That Regard” (Intima, Fall 2020) is a beautiful exploration of what holds one person when their brain is changed, how he adjusts to what the world asks of him and what his life asks of him, and how the values of the normative (the cognitive test) and the personal (his relationship with his wife) give two different pictures of a person. Tremblay deftly uses repetition in language and content as a hook and a key in this tender portrait.
The gentleman in the poem has found a way to create safety for himself out in the world by using a repetitive phrase—“in that regard”—as a “cushion to catch him as his brain let him down,” an “idiom to deflect, / protect, / whatever was left.” The phrasing captures the elegant way he held his own self safe until he could return to the safety of his relationship with his wife, where “his eyes cleared,” and he was “still himself / in that regard.” Tremblay uses repetend (a repeated word or phrase; a refrain) in this achingly beautiful poem to show the repetition employed by many with a brain injury or dementia to keep themselves oriented and safe, or to slowly retrain and regain lost skills. Over and over and over again, he repeats the phrase “in that regard”; over and over again my daughter and I would play snakes and ladders. Over and over again we reclaim and hold on to what makes us whole.
Is this not true for all of us? Anchoring ourselves by the repletion of the hours of the day, the seasons, the rituals and celebrations that link us and give us a history, a story and a sense of self. Repeat after me: I am.
Nancy Huggett is a writer, caregiver and settler descendant who lives in Ottawa, Canada on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people.