The Naming of Fear

After a stroke debilitated the language portion of his brain, my father taught himself how to read and speak again. He worked in a detached library in our backyard, diligently bent over a desk filled with words: the dizzying array of their meanings, the blinding song of long consonants and vowels, the semantic mysteries of a universe he once knew. This means this, but also this. Before the stroke, he taught high school biology, and behind his workstation sat volumes of marine biology, the intricate and nuanced layers of the intertidal zones—a universe of life that existed beneath the waves, just out of sight. Ed Ricketts, his marine biology hero, watched from a charcoal portrait over the door. Contained around my father were taxonomies of meaning, but also the catalog of an intimate and lost memory. How would those slippery bivalves and limpets be named? How would he find the right word to describe the corrugated shells of mollusks? Would it all fit into his brain again? I imagine the task to be overwhelming—the effort and patience it took to relearn words, their pronunciations and meanings irretrievable, buried in the recesses of his mind. I think about the expressions held captive and changing in the fine lines of his mind’s attrition and envision the process of relearning ruled half by sentiment, half by logic, shoving meaning into new forms, new orders, all while combating the fear of possibly losing words forever—even the ability to name fear itself. For one whole year, he worked tirelessly to teach the gray matter of his brain to trip the triggers of memory, and in the process wrote hundreds of words on small flashcards that would appear for years after his death, crumpled in drawers and nestled in books, like tiny messages from the universe. In the years after his death, I found the definition of pear, the semantics of spoon, and the idea of voyage etched on small cards in his thin cursive—his frustration palpable through the shaky slant of his writing. The hand-cut slips of pink paper all bore the definition of the word countered with its pronunciation on the other side, as if the very word that eluded him was the only thing that could give meaning to what he lacked. The stroke happened before I went to middle school, before I joined him in the halls of our shared high school, before he died unexpectedly on Christmas my senior year, before my world plunged into a