I had a very good, best friend who got aphasia after having a small stroke. It can be mild or extreme, he had it pretty bad. It’s the most damnable rotten thing. It is the dysfunction of the neural/physiological connection between having thoughts and being able to formulate and assemble words with ones mouth and jaw muscles trying to express those thoughts.
The stroke (often, typically) damages the ability to formulate the thoughts, as well, so not only does the “computer” get degraded but then the mechanism to to translate those thoughts into audible words gets thrashed. My pal and I had conducted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business together in hundreds of generally easy, fun, and straightforward transactions though the years and post-stroke he could not distinguish between ten, hundred, thousand. He could not distinguish between minute, hour, day, week, month, year. It really become instantly impossible to work together and impossible to work any kind of transaction with him as I could never be sure of what he was thinking/intending. And attempts to do so became intensely difficult because I could never be sure of what he was intending, even when he tried to write out what he wanted, because that functionality was damaged as well. Very sad.
It’s terrible, especially for somebody who was used to speaking and speaking well. Usually with Alzheimer’s, people get frustrated by their inability to speak or remember, and I think it’s worse with stroke-induced aphasia because people know that they’re not the way they once were.
Very tragic. Weirdly enough, I had an elderly friend who had been a teacher for years, but for the last three years had been in care and totally silent. One day, she suddenly woke up and said that she needed to “do my teaching,” which I guess was what she said when she set off for work in the morning.
She talked for hours, perfectly lucid, about God, about life, and she prayed for people she had known. Then she asked when “the boat was coming,” asked the name of the boat, and settled back and was silent again.
Strangely enough, the name of the “boat”…which one of the people present had just said off the top of her head, because she had no idea what the question meant…was the name of the hospice aide who came in to care for her and was there when she died a day or so later.
We never know what is going on with people when they’re silent, what things are being worked out, and what peace will eventually be achieved.
My father-in-law experienced the same thing. Even though I didn’t have business dealings with him, I know exactly what you’re talking about. It IS sad.