Content area
Full text
Patricia H. was a brilliant and energetic woman who represented artists and ran an art gallery on Long Island, and was a talented amateur painter herself. She had raised her three children, and, nearing sixty, she continued to lead an active and even, as her daughters put it, "glamorous" life, with scouting expeditions to the Village and frequent soirees at home--she was a great cook, and there would often be twenty people for dinner. Her husband, too, was a man of many parts--a radio broadcaster, a fine pianist who sometimes performed at night clubs, and politically active. Both were intensely sociable.
In 1989, however, Pat's husband died suddenly, of a heart attack. Pat herself had had open-heart surgery for a damaged valve the year before, and had been put on anticoagulants. She had taken this in stride--but now, with her husband's death, as one of her daughters put it, "She seemed stunned, became very depressed, lost weight, fell in the subway, had accidents with the car, and would show up, as if lost, on our doorstep in Manhattan." Pat had always been somewhat volatile in mood ("She would be depressed for a few days and take to her bed, then leap up in an opposite frame of mind, and rush into the city, a thousand engagements of one sort and another"), but now a fixed melancholy descended on her.
When, in January of 1991, she didn't answer her phone for two days, her daughters became alarmed and called a neighbor, who, with the Long Island police, broke into Pat's house to find her lying in bed unconscious. She had been in a coma for at least twenty hours, the daughters were told, and had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. There was a huge clot of blood in the left half of her brain, the dominant hemisphere, and it was thought that she would not survive.
After a week in the hospital with no improvement, Pat underwent surgery as a last-ditch measure. The results of this, her daughters were told, could not be predicted.
Indeed, it seemed at first, after the clot was removed, that the situation was dire. Pat would "stare . . . without seeming to see," according to one of her daughters. "Sometimes...