Soup
When I was twenty-two, I ran a little burger shop on the beach in Northern Michigan. That summer I would leave work every day and join my 80-something year old friend Liz for happy hour. Overlooking Lake Michigan, we sipped wine and snacked on sour cream and onion dip while we talked politics and love lives and gardening.
She shared her frustrations of having bits of her chipped away by the brain tumor that ended up marking that her last summer.
Most exasperating for her was her loss of word recall.
She knew the word but simply couldn’t find it in her brain so would offer related words for us to hone in on it for her. I dubbed these word charades.
It would go something like this —
The hot liquid you eat with a spoon.
Soup.
The thing in the corner that gives light to the room.
Lamp.
(These unintentionally sound like pages from Goodnight Moon.)
It was a bit like Taboo without the buzzer.
These word associations were approached with humor and patience, but it was obvious that she wished her words came as easily as they once did.
image credit: Strange Planet by Nathan Pyle
