I just learned that Bo Diddley, the elderly blues-and-rock guitarist best known for the classics “Who Do You Love?” and “Bo Diddley,” suffered a stroke following a performance on Saturday night. And even though articles like this one are optimistic that Diddley will play again, I personally think his career is over. He’s 78 years old, and my personal experience with strokes was not a positive one (my grandmother had one when she was still relatively young — early 60s, I believe — and she ended up trapped in a half-paralyzed body, unable to speak, for the last 16 years of her life).
Diddley played Salt Lake not too long ago and I remember thinking that I really ought to make an effort to go see him, because at his age you never know if he’s going to come around again. I really need to pay more attention to thoughts like that…
My wife’s grandfather is 91, and just had a minor stroke. He’s having a little trouble grasping things with his thumb and forefinger on one hand, but they say that will go away with therapy, and he’s already back to dancing 3 nights a week with his girlfriend.
That is not to say that we can predict how Bo Diddley will react, just that there’s a whole range of strokes – some serious, some less so…
Oh, I understand there’s a range — I’m glad your grandfather-in-law had such a minor one, by the way — but as I said, my experience was not a good one, and I tend to be pretty pessimistic about them in general. The talk about Bo in that article I linked to sounded like the same pollyanna-ish efforts my family made in the beginning to convince ourselves that everything was going to be alright. I could be wrong, of course. But there was a familiar ring to them.
I’ll be honest: strokes scare the hell out of me. I can think of few things are awful as what happened to my grandmother. She had some memory issues but was otherwise unimpaired mentally, but she couldn’t express herself in anything but random syllables and, if she concentrated very hard, profanity. (A speech therapist once told the family that it’s a curious thing about strokes: often the speech centers are pretty much hosed, but the cussing center is apparently somewhere else in the brain and remains functional…)