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A father's walk, a mother's postcard
The walk
He dropped the boy's hand and put an arm around his shoulder to say it. Then he added that Mother would be calling them to dinner and it was time to get back. They never discussed it again, but the son, Raymond Plank, kept the moment fresh in his mind for nearly 80 years.
The postcard
When the boy was 15, his mother wrote him a postcard a few days before she died. In it she wrote that the 15 years she had shared with him were glorious ones, that she had known no joy equal to his companionship, and that her pride in him would go on through the years if he kept his head up and his courage and faith high.
The night she died
She died at 47 of a blood clot to the brain after a routine appendectomy, only hours before he was to drive his father to the hospital to bring her home. At 3 a.m., the phone rang. Northwestern Hospital was calling for Mr. Plank. The boy called up to his father, who was asleep in the master bedroom above him, and heard him scream as he hurried to the phone.
For six months after that, he could not write in his diary. He asked why God would let this happen.
How can surgery lead to deadly blood clots?
Surgery and the bed rest after it slow blood flow in the leg veins, and the operation itself triggers clotting. In the 1850s, the German physician Rudolf Virchow described three conditions that favor clots: slowed flow, injury to a vessel wall, and blood that clots too readily. A piece of clot that breaks free travels with the blood to other organs, and in the brain it can block an artery. Blood thinners such as heparin were first tried in patients in the mid-1930s and came into routine hospital use in the 1940s.
Why do some childhood moments stay vivid for decades?
Psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term flashbulb memory in 1977 for vivid recollections of emotionally charged moments. Emotion engages the amygdala, which strengthens how well the brain stores an event. A 2003 study by Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin followed students after the September 11 attacks and found that confidence in the memory stayed high while its details drifted at about the same rate as the recall of an ordinary day.
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