A stroke left my husband unable to speak. It took me a while before I realized he was still communicating without words.

• My husband of 35 years had a stroke that left him unable to speak.
• He could walk, squeeze my fingers, and lift his legs, but only sounds came out of his mouth.

One day my husband, Hunt, stopped making sense. Food fell out of his mouth and became stuck in his beard. His arm was bent oddly, hanging closely to his chest. Paramedics clustered around him in our Indiana home, but before I could process it, he was helicoptered to the nearest level-one trauma hospital and rushed into surgery. Hours later, in a crowded four-person ICU, I held his hand. He didn't speak or open his eyes, but he did make odd sounds. I was so relieved that he was, that I didn't focus on anything else.

He had a stroke, but we didn't know how it'd impact him

"Occluded left carotid artery with a large blood clot and infarct in central and posterior main arteries" was his diagnosis. Translation: He'd had a stroke. But what that meant, exactly, no one could say — not CT scans, MRI scans, or doctors and their posses of students, residents, and postdocs. Global aphasia. Paraphasia. Fluent aphasia. Expressive aphasia. Words that labeled but didn't provide a prognosis.

The good news was that physically he was fine. He looked the same. He could walk, squeeze my fingers, and lift his legs. But to tell anybody how he was feeling, or if he was seeing double, or to ask for a glass of water? Nothing but garbled sounds came out. A cruel fate for a man who loved connecting with people and made his living — as a high-level salesman — talking.

I kept pushing him to communicate with me

I was obsessed with his recovery — wanting him to return to the voluble partner and father of three kids I'd been married to for 35 years — so I looked for interventions. I drove him to various therapies. I drilled him and drilled him again. Angry, scared, missing him, and grieving, I pushed and nagged him to practice.

Spontaneous recovery, while technically still possible, was a long shot. The biggest window for neuroplasticity — using other parts of the brain for functions usually handled by damaged areas — was shrinking. New studies say that never ends, growth just slows, but still, I felt the clock was running against us. Panicked, I organized games, got Legos and jigsaw puzzles to put together, insisted he finish his therapy homework, and signed him up for aphasia Zooms and webinars.

He just wanted to take naps.

Medical journals offered no answers. I searched for someone whose experience was similar to his but who had recovered — someone who spoke, read, and wrote. Someone to point the way. Everything I read was meaningless and vague.

"Find new ways to communicate," one brochure said. I mentally flipped the bird. How was I supposed to do that?

He hated how I threw out one word after the other, trying to guess what he wanted to say. That frustrated him and he shut down, stopping my search for context.

When I realized he was actively trying to temper his frustration with me because he didn't want to be a burden, I cried for the first time.

We went to a support group at a local university. He loved it, immediately becoming a leader in his Uno group, pointing and fist-bumping. Not long after, I watched as he interacted with the nurse taking his blood labs and noticed how he exaggerated his gestures and made faces, successfully making her laugh. I could almost hear him asking if she had any pets, his standard small talk. Suddenly, I saw him. The same man. He was still here.

In my focus to help, to fix him, to give him words, had I missed the point? He was communicating, I just wasn't listening.

We no longer finish each other's sentences. He watches TikTok and laughs. I read. The dog and cat don't miss the absence of intelligible words, but they understand the tone of his sounds and snuggle up to him.

The silence is no longer lonely. My love is still here.