“I Blame Cookie Monster” by Maren Kinkade

My father is 86 and has a bad heart. After years of waiting for him to simply not wake up one day, my mother’s stroke was shocking and bizarre.  The night it happened, it was Cookie Monster’s fault I got lost on the way to the hospital. 

A few weeks prior, my friend told me a phone app we use for navigating traffic had - for a limited time! – added Cookie Monster to the list of narrators.  We thought it was hilarious.   "Traffic reported ahead!  C is for careful... and also for cookie!  Om nom nom nom nom… "  

I got the call that my mother had been sent by helicopter to the stroke unit at one o’clock in the morning.  Though I know where the hospital is, I was disoriented and anxious, so I asked the app to give me directions.  I had forgotten about Cookie Monster until a mile out of my driveway, when his voice came on. It was no longer funny, it was merely creepy, but I didn’t want to stop and faff with the settings on the app. 

A few miles up the highway, traffic was being rerouted because of construction, which for some reason the app didn’t know.  So much for AI knowing everything.  I immediately regretted not stopping to change the app settings when Cookie Monster said “At the roundabout, take the fifth exit.  Oh!  Let’s count to FIVE!”

The app routed me through a part of town I rarely visit.  I found myself in the dead of night passing pawn shops, small car dealerships with names like Uptown Motors and Smooshies, antique shops, bars, tattoo parlors and … did I really just see a music store? I mean a place I could purchase albums and CDs?  I thought those went away in the nineties.  

Surprisingly, Cookie Monster got me there, but to the main hospital doors which were closed. By the time I parked and went in through the emergency department,  Mother was already in surgery.

Over the next few days, the family took turns with Mother in Neuro ICU.  In the next room lay an Asian youth who looked far too young to have had a stroke.  His large family also took turns with him, taking breaks to cry in the halls and waiting room.  Even when one does not look and tries to honor privacy, it is impossible to do that well in a small and busy ICU.  One cannot miss when a hospice counselor comes and goes.  Though heartbreaking and tragic, I was happy to see his family so loving and engaged, even in the midst of their suffering.  Many people in the crowd spoke another language and many were about his age.  I constructed his fictional backstory in my mind: he was perhaps one of five or six brothers and sisters and his family emigrated here together.  Every aunt, uncle, parent, grandparent, or cousin was there to support him and each other. Even though he was unconscious, surely his body absorbed the loving energy they brought to the room? 

When I arrived the morning of the third day that room was empty and clean, waiting for another patient. 

As Mother recovered, the medical staff wanted her to sit up in a chair and be awake more during daylight hours.  Mother is an extremely well read, well-traveled woman.  She is a voracious reader and quite opinionated.  Although I am familiar with the bad affect of stroke, I was not really prepared to watch her struggle for words.  She was frustrated with herself as well.  We watched her face change as she groped for words and their meaning or when asking for common objects such as water.  The speech therapist instructed everyone not to feed her words or complete her thoughts and sentences, but instead to be patient and let her work through finding words and expressing herself at her own pace.  My father in particular found this challenging.  Everyone was used to her being able to express herself in spades. 

One day I was trying to keep her company, but she still wasn’t talking very well, and I didn’t want the Television droning on and on.  I said, how about I read to you?  All I had with me was The Economist and a new e-reader I got last month for my birthday which contained four books, one of which is an anthropological analysis of Scandinavia and didn't really suit.  The next day I was armed with a book of traditional Norse fairy tales instead.

It is absolutely true what they say, the elderly can and do revert to childhood in these circumstances.  I found myself reflecting on being a small child in the 1970s, my mother turning on our thirteen-inch black and white television with a knob that turned to change the channels, to watch Cookie Monster, Susan, Gordon, Bert and Earnie, and all the rest of the company on Sesame Street.  Now I am almost 50, my mother is almost 90, and it’s me trying to find fairy tales to read to her.

After five days in hospital, she was sent to a rehab facility.  My sister also tried reading to her and discovered even an article in Time magazine was to difficult for her to follow. So, I suggested something simple – I said I would try Darwin’s Origin of Species.  She did not laugh. 

The speech therapist left brain games for us including a lite version of taboo.  Splitting a stack of cards displaying random words, we took turns trying to describe the word for the other to guess.  Somehow or another, Mother got words such as toothbrush and peach but my words included luggage and oboe.  Oboe?  Of all the instruments in an orchestra to pick.  At the top of the list of opposites (what is the opposite of light?  What is the opposite of bad?), I see the work sanitize.  Ok, what?  Even I struggled to think of the opposite of sanitize, eventually deciding the answer is filth.  When I got home that night, I checked the internet which helpfully suggested dirty.  Apparently, I was overthinking it. 

I must have had Cookie Monster in the back of my mind the whole time, because once she was home I decided to play her clips of the exquisite Sir Ian McKellen and that actor – the gentleman who plays Loki in the Marvel movies – giving Cookie Monster vocabulary lessons.  They delightfully but unforgettably teach Cookie Monster about Resist and Restraint respectively.  Initially, I worried lessons on Sesame Street would be insulting.  She might be relearning vocabulary, but she is still a mature, well-trod adult.  When not distracted by the nuisance of finding the right words, she is a very good conversationalist.  Then I remembered sanitize and let that go.  We spent a delightful hour watching Cookie Monster get schooled. 

I may not be a doctor, but I do believe getting her to laugh like that was more therapeutic than agonizing over the opposite of sanitize. 

About Maren Kinkade
She/Her/Hers

Maren Kinkade lives in Denver with her sweetheart and three cats, and writes short stories on occasion and when inspired to do so.