A Stroke of Luck

I almost died before I got old, and with all due respect to Pete Townshend, that wasn’t the plan. 

There had been broken bones, heel spurs, cataracts, sleep apnea and plenty of therapy, but none of that was going to get in the way of a long, active, happy, productive life.

Then one afternoon a year ago, I wrote an email to a friend cancelling our weekly walk. I had a headache and felt a cold coming on. After that–nothing. 

My wife tells me she came home from dinner with friends that night and found me on the couch, unresponsive (she’s been kind enough never to say “more unresponsive than usual”). When I woke up weeks later, much weakened but still myself, they told me that I’d experienced a stroke, or more specifically a subarachnoid hemorrhage of unknown origin.

It usually kills half of its victims right then and there. It usually kills half of the people who make it to the hospital. It usually leaves the other half of those people with significant, permanent damage. When I asked my father, a retired doctor, why it happened, he answered: shitty luck. Somehow, now that I’ve made a full recovery,  I feel very lucky indeed. 

I was born in 1964, but in most other ways, I’ve spent decades feeling that I’d missed out on the Baby Boom–I was one of the first white babies born in a mixed-race delivery ward in Baltimore, Maryland, which meant the Civil Rights Era had almost come to an end. I don’t remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, much less Elvis. My first Bob Dylan record was Slow Train Coming, and my first Grateful Dead record was Reckoning. I don’t remember Vietnam or the moon landing or Watergate.

But in other ways, the stroke that left me in a wheelchair and a diaper has connected me to the generation that I thought I didn’t belong to in ways that high blood pressure didn’t.

I owe my recovery to a very fortunate intersection of circumstances. I was relatively young when it happened–only 59. I was in very good condition and had been for years: running and yoga and squash, no drinking, no meat, no smoking (well, maybe a bit, but only after midnight, as Steve Martin joked).

I went to college in the Reagan years, and after working at the Village Voice and The New York Times and the Associated Press, I got a Ph.D. in English. After teaching at Columbia, Fordham and the City College of New York, getting married and having two children, I moved with my young family to the Netherlands, where my wife was born and raised.

There I was fortunate to land a position, eventually with tenure, at the University of Amsterdam’s English-language honor’s college. I am lucky to live in a country with an excellent health-care system. In addition to medical care and rehabilitation (this being the Netherlands, they had me on a bicycle doing laps in the gym on my second day there), my wife and I both had long-term access, together and separately, to a psychologist and a social worker. 

And don’t let them tell you any lies about socialized medicine. We pay less than $400 per month in health insurance–that’s for the both of us–and I have yet to see a bill for all of the care I received over the course of my year-long recovery, which included a month in the hospital, two weeks of in-patient rehab, and then months more of out-patient rehab. And I never had to worry about my job.

The Netherlands has strict protections for workers with health problems. I continued to receive my full salary for a year, with numerous meetings with a doctor in a practice hired by my university to make sure my reintegration was sustainable. I began teaching one class after five months, two classes after eight months, and I was able to return to full-time work after a year, because I wanted to, not because I had to. 

I knew something was going right when my supervisor told me: “Jonathan, you are the most important person in this situation. If your absence causes a problem, that’s our problem, not yours, and we will solve it in a way that allows you to return when you’re ready.” I don’t have to go to work–I get to go to work.

I am also lucky to have a support system. Friends in the Netherlands and in the United States wrote, called and visited–an old college buddy even brought whitefish! My father, brother and sister came through, as I knew they would, making the trip to Europe to sit by my hospital bed, feed me that horrible hospital food, and push my wheelchair. 

Most important of all, my wife and our two children were with me every step of the way, making sure I got the right kind and the right amount of medical attention, and the other kind of attention as well. She brought my guitar to the hospital, set up our chess set, and actually moved into the hospital to sleep next to me every night. Best of all, we fell in love with each other all over again, and a year later we’re closer than ever. So when people tell me that 2024 was a bad year, I have to disagree.

There has certainly been a change in priorities. I now run or work out in the park every day, no exceptions, and I get a good night’s sleep every night. I now know that the little things are the big things, and that for me, ordinary is now a miracle. I only do things that are fun or important.

After years of answering emails and grading papers 24/7, I no longer work nights and weekends.

I no longer get annoyed at litterbugs or people who don’t signal before they turn, and I no longer carry on long arguments in my mind with neighbors or colleagues–too bad, because I won every one of those arguments. My only rule about food is that I don’t make any rules about food. 

I am letting go of books that I will never read, and have given up on all forms of collecting, physical or otherwise. I cherish old friends, who know my story and are still interested in the next chapter. I no longer keep up with the latest news in Gaza or Washington, D.C.

It’s not that I don’t care–it’s just that Netanyahu and Trump are going to be Netanyahu and Trump, and they’re just not welcome in my mental real estate. I take my counsel from friends from the Middle East, who ought to know how to survive hard times: By living my life now, and helping everyone I know live theirs, and by letting go of things that I can’t change. So I stay focused on what the film My Dinner with Andre–it’s since replaced The Big Lebowski as my favorite movie–calls “pockets of light”: family, friends, neighbors, students and colleagues.

These transformations are much informed by the literature, history, and philosophy I have taught for decades–the Stoics have been particularly useful. But strangely enough, though perhaps predictable for someone of “my generation.” I’ve become what in Hebrew is called a ba’al teshuvah, a secular Jew who has “returned” to observance–but in my own way. 

I’m not a believer, but I daven every Saturday morning at a local orthodox synagogue. It’s something that I can’t explain and don’t have to. I like to say I’ve become religious but not spiritual. I just felt the need, even before the stroke, before Oct. 7, 2023, for a more authentic, deeper Jewish experience.  

So in many ways, though I’m on the outer edge of the Baby Boom, my trajectory is typical,  even cliched, and I’m fine with that. No apologies, then, to Pete Townshend: I hope I’ve learned how to live before I get old.