My husband, Patrick, must have been an elephant in a previous life. Not only is he republican, but he has an incredible memory.

If we were driving around his old stomping grounds, he would point to a house and tell me who use to live there, and with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face, a little anicdote about a related adventure he had had there.

It didn't really matter if I knew the person he was referring to or not, or if he had told me the story the last ten times we went by the house- he was going to tell me again. It at times had become annoying, and I had sometimes stopped humoring him with my undivided attention. We would pass a point of interset and he would get that twinkle, and before he could get three words out I would cut him off and finish his story for him in a "Reader's Digest's Condensed Version" fashion.

He would look at me amazed that, could he have already told me that story? Maybe he was amazed because he didn't realise that I really had been paying attention the first nine times he told me, or that I could now recall the names of people from his past that I had never laid eyes on.

Sometimes I would feel rather guilty for cutting him off, he was, after all, just trying to share his life history with me. A past of teenage years that had been filled with a healthy mix of rebellion, scholastic achievement, and hormones. Sometimes his stories would be so detailed that during later recallition, I would have trouble remembering if it were his story or mine.

With the stoke and subsiquent aphasia, the stories have stopped, or at least in the way they had been told before.

Now days, when we see the ghosts of his past lives, I am the one to tell HIM the story of what he did there. Don't get me wrong- he knows exactly what happened, he was, after all, an elephant in his past life. Now it's just up to me to be the one to tell the story, to try to remember what everyone had said and done. I can't tell them with the same exuberance or detail, but I give it my best. Now days, I tell the story while he still has the twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face. His legacy lives on.

Kristen