Dear Reader,
Today's guest author is Stephen L. Hauser, M.D., author of The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries, a doctor's powerful and deeply human memoir about the mysteries of the brain and his 40-year quest to find a treatment for Multiple Sclerosis.
Dr. Hauser is Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Director of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. His research as a physician-scientist has led to a powerful new approach to the treatment of multiple sclerosis, a disabling neurologic disease. His work has received numerous awards, including the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, the Dystel Prize, the Charcot Award, the Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Research, and the Scientific Breakthrough Award from the American Brain Foundation. He has also served as a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Enter to win one of two copies of The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries. Send an email with your preferred shipping address to: [email protected]
EVERLASTING LOVE
It is now 2023. A new year has begun. The third in a row like no others in a century. Pandemic, masks, Zooms, isolation.
Crises bring out the best in people, though. The response to COVID-19 has been a triumph of science. Thanks to heroic efforts, we received great tests and better vaccines and treatments, all in record time. Spinoffs from advances made against this virus will benefit many other health problems. So much to look forward to.
Still, the joys of looking back are no less sweet.
My wife is forward-looking. Nostalgia makes her sad; but for me, the opposite is true. Reaching back fills me with warmth and joy. When our boys were little, after they were tucked in, I'd sometimes sneak in after returning late from a long day at work. They'd make room for me under the covers. We'd talk about the day, share stories and play games, always in a whisper so Mom wouldn't hear. It was one of our favorite things to do.
Now in their 30s, they still bring up memories of those long-ago moments, moonglow lighting their pillowcases and frigid air wafting through the old bedroom windows. Each had a room, but they preferred sleeping together, two in the bed and one on the floor. They are now all taller than me, more muscular and athletic, in the season of launching their own families, but in my mind's eye, they are the same little wide-eyed guys.
But is the five-year-old wordsmith still really there, that innocent child who, in his kindergarten project for Mother's Day penned the line, "A mother is someone who sits on the porch with you at night and listens to the crickets."
In strict molecular terms, they are not. Each of their atoms has since been recycled many times, and today they're made up of atoms that used to be parts of plants, oceans, other people. My kids now have more atoms that were once in a 'T. rex' than were in their bodies when we curled up together those long years ago.
Nonetheless, they remember the big events of their childhood and love to reminisce. Their memory circuits recalling our times together are, thank goodness, unbroken; the threads strengthen with use and fade with inactivity, as they are recalled or lay fallow.
So, even though my boys are not exactly the same, to me they are still my guys. And I'm still their dad who loves them unconditionally, even though every atom that was me then has also been replaced.
-- Stephen L. Hauser
Enter to win one of two copies of The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries. Send an email with your preferred shipping address to: [email protected]
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
- This month's Penguin Classics is To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading and enter for your chance to win
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